


two can be as bad as one

by myeyesarenotblue



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Humor, Canon-Typical Violence, Comedy, Gen, Humor, Mild Gore, Post-Canon Fix-It, Power Swap, Spoilers for Season 1, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2019-11-26 17:40:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18183713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myeyesarenotblue/pseuds/myeyesarenotblue
Summary: “Five, sweet little Five” Klaus says, from where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, next to one of the living room’s couches, instead of sitting on it like a normal person. “We love you but what the fuck”Five growls, like he’s a dog or something. “It should correct itself”





	1. What the fuck, Five!

**Author's Note:**

> i don't even know what this is

Diego blinks for half a second and suddenly everyone looks like they’re twelve and _what the hell._ That's- that can’t be a good sign.  “Oh my- _shit_ ” someone says, and it’s Klaus, all gangly limbs and stupid high voice that Diego thought he’d never hear again and _jesus christ_ , what the fuck is going on.  

They’re still standing in a circle, just like they were a moment ago when the world was going up in flames, but _now_ , now. “What the fuck, Five!”  

Five narrows his eyes. “Oh, I’m _sorry,_ Diego. I don’t know if you noticed, but I was in a bit of a rush, I didn’t exactly have the time to-” he stops dead in his tracks.  

And Diego is about to start yelling because he just- he straight up _refuses_ to be a teenager again, and Five has some explaining to do, but something catches his eye. And everyone’s, for that matter-  

There’re a thousand little pieces of rocks and dirt and whatever, which would be completely normal because apparently Five also zapped them into the academy’s patio, but- they're all floating. Just _floating_ all around them and Diego doesn’t know much about anything but he’s pretty sure rocks shouldn’t do that.  

“Uh, who’s doing that?” Allison asks. And that's a perfectly good question, because Vanya’s still passed out on Luther’s arms and she’s the only one with that sort of power.  

Five makes a choked noise and the grounds shakes once, twice and then the rocks fall back down to the ground.  

Diego stares.  

That’s- _no_.  

Five raises a hand tentatively and the rocks start just- fucking shaking where they are or something and then they raise back up slowly.  

“What the fuck did you do?” Diego needs a break.  

*

So they’re not twelve. They’re _thirteen,_ Five says. They’re thirteen because Five didn’t want to go _that_ back in time, just the one week to the day of dad’s funeral, and he had to use their suspended bodies or animated versions of themselves or-  

Diego wasn’t paying attention at all.

He was far more preoccupied with the fact that they’re _thirteen_ and apparently Five also managed to mess up their powers when he did whatever he did. Diego thought that maybe it was just Five’s powers that got fucked up at first (and wouldn’t that have been nice?) but the second everyone was calm enough to take a deep breath and look around Klaus started _screaming_ about not seeing Ben anywhere and, well, if neither Five or Klaus’ thing was working the way they should then-  it was just foolish to believe the rest of them were safe.

The second the thought went through Diego’s mind; he grabbed a tiny rock from the ground, aimed at Luther’s forehead and- _he missed._ Not by much, really, the thing still hit him (“ _Ouch_ \- Diego, what’s wrong with you!”) but it landed off center and not exactly where Diego wanted it to and _it’s all Five’s fault._

“Five, sweet little Five” Klaus says, from where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, next to one of the living room’s couches, instead of sitting on it like a normal person. “We love you but what the fuck”

Five growls, like he’s a dog or something. “It should correct itself”

“And the apocalypse?” Luther asks.  

“Well, if our powers aren’t working like they’re supposed to, then Vanya shouldn’t be able to blow up the moon” Five says looking down at couch where Vanya is laying (and she’s _still_ passed out, even after they practically dragged her into the house when Luther’s arms just gave out under her weight- maybe they should take her to a hospital), but he doesn’t look very convinced. It makes Diego kind of nervous because he’s almost a hundred percent convinced that Five has Vanya’s power now and the kid’s a little psycho who could very much blow up the moon if he felt like it.

And besides- who the hell knows what Vanya ended up with. Even if her power isn’t at a hundred percent, she could still be dangerous. That’s the one and only thing that Diego will recognize dad was right about, they’re all dangerous. It took them all years and years of training, of error and trial, to even begin to understand how their powers worked, how to use them and control them, and Vanya- she didn’t get any of that.  

“Five, you don’t know that. She could wake up right now and murder us all” Luther says and _god_ , his hair hasn’t looked that blond in _years,_ what the hell. Diego almost wants to disagree with him just for the sake of it.  

“Well, then I guess we’ll have to wait until she wakes up” Five answers.  

“So what? We’re just supposed to sit around and-”

“Yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to do”

“ _Five,_ that’s not-”  

“Luther!” Diego decides to step in, because the walls start shaking around them and if Vanya tore the house down once already with her freaky power, then Five could do it again and Diego does _not_ want to relive that. “For once in your life, can you shut up and listen for a second?” he says “Five’s saying she’s not going to have the means to kill us even if she wants to”

Luther sets his jaw in that annoying way of his that can only mean he’s two seconds away from throwing punches. “Is that supposed to be comforting?”  

And _no,_ no it’s not comforting, but sitting around and doing nothing is literally the only thing any of them can do right now and why the hell can’t Luther understand and just shut-  

“God, you’re all idiots” says a voice behind Diego’s back.  

And _what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck-_ Diego pats blindly at his clothes, trying to find a knife or something- _anything_ to defend himself with (there’s _nothing._ Five seriously has some explaining to do), he turns around as fast as he can and to face whoever said that that wasn’t there a second ago, and there’s-  

 _Ben._  

“Ben?” Diego asks.

He must be hallucinating because Ben, _Ben_ , as in his dead brother Ben is just- standing there, staring at him with a slightly crazed look in his eyes like he’s not sure Diego is actually speaking to him and _fuck._ He doesn’t even look all glowing and flickering blue light like he did when Klaus conjured him on the theater- he looks good, and whole, and almost _alive_.

He also looks thirteen. Huh.  

“You have Ben!” Klaus yells accusingly and points a finger in Diego’s direction.  

*

Diego has Ben.  

And it’s _awesome_ , because he missed his brother far more than he even realized, but.  

But then, much later, when they’re done talking through all they need to talk through, and Diego is left alone, walking through the halls of the academy, then he sees them. They’re dark and gory figures lurking in the corners of the house, screaming, begging, yelling, their insides sprawled out, their faces dripping with blood and chunks of god knows what else and, and- it's almost too much to handle.  

It makes Diego feel small and powerless and impossibly scared and for the first time in what seems like forever he can truly and fully understand Klaus and his demons.  

But that’s later.  

*

Now, Five quirks an eyebrow. “So, we _did_ swap powers”

“Uh, hi Diego” Ben says, almost sheepishly, like he’s somehow embarrassed to be seen and heard by Diego.  

Diego doesn’t even know what to say, he just can’t tear his eyes away from Ben’s face. How many times did he lay awake at night, picturing all the things he could’ve done different the day that Ben died? All the things he’d say if he ever saw his brother again?  

He wants to reach out and hug him or something, but Klaus always said touching a ghost was pretty much impossible (turns out it isn’t, but Diego isn’t even going to pretend to know how to do it). He reaches slowly and watches with some sort of morbid fascination as his hand phases through Ben’s shoulder like it isn’t even there.  

“You ok there?” Ben asks, staring at his own shoulder where Diego’s hand is.  

Diego pulls his back and clenches it into a fist, that’s really not how he pictured his first conversation in forever with his dead brother to go. Going through people’s bodies is probably against ghost etiquette. “Yeah, sorry” he throws Ben a quick grin that he sort of hopes is reassuring. “You just caught me by surprise”

“Are you done?” Luther asks, and it pulls Diego out of his trance. “We still have to decide what to do”

“We already decided what to do, _One_ ” Five says. “We’re going to wait until Vanya wakes up and we’re not going to let her bring the end of times”  

It sounds like a solid plan to Diego, but, of course, Luther never knows when to shut up.  “Ok, I get that she’s our sister and everything,” he starts, and that’s why Diego doesn’t like him. “But she literally tried to kill us. I know you guys want to think she just threw a temper tantrum and it was a mistake but- she _wanted us dead._ She destroyed the world. She killed everyone, she would’ve killed us”

There’s a long stretch of silence after that.  

“Luther” Allison starts to say, then she stops. She takes a deep breath, opens her mouth to speak and-  

And then, in the blink of an eye, she isn’t standing where she was a second ago. Diego blinks, and wills his mind to understand where the _hell_ did she go, because people straight up disappearing in front of his eyes is _not_ normal. He turns around wildly and watches as everyone does the same- and then, he hears the distinct sound of one of Five’s portals.  

The air directly above Luther shifts and wraps itself in blue light and suddenly, Allison is yelping and almost falling face first into Luther’s lap. “Shit, _fuck_ ” she says, and Luther just barely manages to catch her before she falls to the ground.  

“I need a drink” Five says, walking towards the bar. “Anybody want anything?”  


	2. You're not dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for your amazing comments!! <3

Vanya wakes up in the middle of the night, during Diego’s turn of watching her.  

Diego’s sitting on the living room, with Vanya’s feet on his lap, idly flipping through one of dad’s journals about her powers. It’s mostly full of bullshit about Vanya being inordinate and disappointing and uncontrollable but there’s a couple pages here and there with actual useful information.  

Like how her power fuels on sound. The louder and longer a sound is, the louder and longer Vanya’s immediate response is. Which, fun. That explains the violin thing.  

Diego is reading through a page about Vanya’s birth mother, some poor fifteen year old Russian girl who had no clue what was going on with the random magical baby, and he’s wondering just how none of them ever tried to find their birth families (maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t) when he feels her shifting in the couch next to him.  

He freezes, drops the journal and trades it for a knife. “Hey” he starts “You awake?”  

She sits up abruptly, and blinks slowly.  

Diego watches as she takes in her surroundings. Her eyebrows shot up to her forehead when she looks at Diego and then at herself. “Am I dead?” she asks, and Diego feels bad for wanting to laugh.  

“No, no, you’re not dead” he says, as he puts the knife down. Vanya looks mostly confused, and Diego decides to take a calculated risk and assume she won’t try to kill him right now. “Five fucked us up”  

“Oh”  

“Yeah, he’s a little shit, but, uh, he saved us”  

Vanya nods. “We’re in the past?”  

“Sort of,” Diego wrinkles his nose. “It’s still 2019, dad’s funeral but- he says he’s not sure why all look like we’re children” he decides to leave the part about their powers out for now.  

“Ok, that’s fine, I guess” Vanya says, then she rubs a hand all over her face. It messes up her bangs. “God, Diego- I’m so fucking sorry”  

“Hey, hey” Diego says, and he scoots closer to her to wrap an arm around her shoulders “It was a mistake, we all make mistakes”  

And sure, most people’s mistakes don’t lead to the end of the human race but- Vanya’s crying into his shoulder and what kind of shit brother would he be if he pointed that out?  

 

*

 

When Diego finally, _finally_ , makes it to his bedroom after waking everyone up to let them know Vanya is awake and she isn’t murderous anymore- he finds a stupid ghost inside.  

It’s a woman, with her neck twisted into an unnatural angle and blood dripping down her face. It looks like she was hung or had her neck broken or something and she’s just _fucking standing there_ . She’s next to Diego’s dresser, and _god_ , fuck, she’s trying to speak- her mouth twisting into horrifying shapes and making little chocked noises that no creature should ever make and-  

The door to his bedroom swigs open wildly and Diego almost jumps a foot up in the air. Klaus walks in, followed by Ben.  

“Guten tag, dear brother” Klaus says and he throws himself dramatically in Diego’s bed. “I thought I’d be generous and let you swap rooms with me”   

Diego frowns. “And why would I want your room?”  

“So you don’t have to deal with- _that_ ” Klaus says, and gestures vaguely to where the ghost with the broken neck is standing.  

And yeah, ok, fair point, Diego would very much rather not deal with seeing that ghost and he’s sure he won’t be able to sleep even a blink if the thing keeps making those noises-  

“Wait, hold on,” he says, when it suddenly occurs to him “I thought you said you couldn’t see ghosts right now”  

“I can’t” Klaus says, giggling like a maniac. “I haven’t seen a single fucking ghost tonight and it’s _awesome_. No offence Ben, wherever you are”  

Ben snorts. “Tell him I get tired of his dumb face too”

“Ben says it’s fine” Diego says, but he’s still thinking about the ghost on the corner of the room. “How do you know about her then?”  

Klaus hums. “Well, she’s hanged out in that corner ever since I can remember”  

And- Diego is never going to recover from the knowledge that he spent his entire childhood sleeping next to that _thing_. He decides he’s never going to step foot inside his room ever again, unless it’s strictly necessary.  

So he goes, and he sleeps in Klaus’ bedroom that night. And it’s funny, but even knowing about the disturbing ghosts that lurk around the house- sleeping surrounded by Klaus’ shit, his posters from obscure bands and scribbling in the walls, he feels safe.

*

The next morning, when Diego goes down to the kitchen for breakfast, Vanya is sitting at her usual spot at the head of the table and everyone’s not so subtly avoiding her and sitting as far away as humanly possible on the other side.  

Even _Ben_ is standing in a corner opposite from her, what the hell. “Morning” Diego mumbles at the idiots, because he still has manners.  

He walks over to the counter and kisses mom’s cheek (and hadn’t _that_ been the best thing ever? walking into the house and running into _mom_ , mom, that he honest to god thought he’d never get to see again). He grabs the plate that she offers him and makes a point of dragging a chair to Vanya’s side and sitting next to her.  

“Hey, sis” he tells her “How are you holding up?”

Vanya looks up to him and gives him a wobbly smile. “I’m good,” she says hesitantly, clearly shoving a spoonful of eggs in her mouth to avoid talking.

“Good, good” Diego says, feeling sort of inadequate all of the sudden. What do you say to someone who almost ended the world but then felt sorry about it? Should he offer a hug? Diego doesn’t like hugging.  

Allison drags her chair to sit on Vanya’s other side and reaches to hold one of her hands, and that’s why Diego always thought Allison was smartest of the bunch.  

They eat in silence for a while.  

And it’s all good and nice and normal and Diego thinks they can probably get away with having breakfast like decent, civilised people, but then-  

“Ok, that’s enough” Luther says, standing up abruptly. “Vanya, are you going to try something?”  

Vanya blinks a couple times. “Something?” she parrots back.  

“Yes, something” Luther repeats, like somehow he’s the eloquent one and Vanya’s just stupid.  

“Luther-” Diego starts, as a warning, but Luther just squares his shoulders and raises his chin up high. It’s such a dumb, _dumb_ look for his thirteen year old face- Diego can’t take him seriously.  

“Vanya” Luther says, “I need you to tell us if you’re going to try to kills us”  

“Why would I- ”  

“Oh my god, Luther” Klaus exclaims loudly, interrupting Vanya and nearly punching Five in the face when he stands up and gestures widely. “You can’t just ask people if they want to kill you”  

“We need to _know_ ” Luther says and he clenches his hand into a fist, bringing it down into the table forcefully. The table rattles and it wound be all authoritative and menacing but the effect is lost when Luther yelps and cradles his arm to his chest.  

Diego can’t help but laugh. “Everything ok there, buddy?”  

Luther glares and gives him one of those murderous looks that always ends in bruises for Diego, and Diego considers apologizing but then he suddenly realizes that if they were to fight right now, without Luther’s inhuman strength- _Diego would win._ He doesn’t even need his knifes, he would just swoop in and kick Luther’s ass.  

Diego _needs_ to kick Luther’s ass, right now.  

“Hey, Luther,” he says, and takes a second to wonder what’s the fastest way to rile Luther up. Maybe if Diego starts talking about dad and the moon, Luther will want to punch him. “Do you-”

A loud crash interrupts him.  

Diego startles and looks around toward the source of the noise- and it’s Vanya. Vanya, who’s holding the broken pieces of the cup she was drinking her orange juice in. The juice is everywhere and there’s tiny pieces of glass scattered all around the table.  

Vanya blinks slowly and drops the broken glass. “Uh, sorry, I'll clean this up” she says, and she places her hand on the table to gain leverage to stand up, which, cool, whatever- but then Diego has to make a double take, because he watches as the wooden planks from the table bend themselves out of shape under Vanya’s hand.  

She lifts her hand up immediately, but the damage is done- the table now has a hand shaped indent.  

“How did I-” she starts, staring at the table. Diego realizes she’s got to be confused as fuck because nobody bothered to explain what happened with their powers, and ok, he’s a shit brother.  

“Don’t worry, you just, uh-” Diego doesn’t have a clue how to explain it to Vanya so that she won’t freak out. He ends up staring at her for way longer than he should.  

“Huh. Someone finally stole Luther’s superman party trick” Ben says, and _jesus_ , Diego doesn’t remember him ever being so snarky. But then again, Diego guesses, that’s probably what being dead for years with no one but Klaus for company does to a person.

Diego chuckles. “Yeah, that” he says, and gestures towards Ben. He remembers that no one else can hear Ben’s commentary but him a second too late, when everyone stares at him like he’s nuts. “I’m not crazy!” Diego says, a little defensively, because it’s not his fault that Ben is _right there_ and no one else can see him. “It’s just, Ben said-”

“Vanya, sweetheart!” Klaus says, running over to give her a side hug. “Congratulations! You’ve finally dethroned Luther!”

“I’ve- _what_?” Vanya asks, because Klaus is vague as fuck when he speaks and if Diego didn’t know exactly what was going on, he’d be lost too.  

Luther clenches and unclenches his fists a couple times. “I wasn’t dethroned, ok? I’m still number one” he says, as if there was an actual throne involved and it wasn’t just the dumb ranking that everyone but him outgrew.  

“Sure, whatever you say, Luther” Allison says, in the exact same tone she uses to talk to small, petulant children.  

 

*

 

“Fuck, I forgot about Hazel and Cha-Cha” Five says, sometime during the afternoon.

Diego frowns. “The furry psychos?”  

“Yeah, yeah, the furry psychos” he says, waving a hand dismissively. Five clenches his fists, making a frankly stupid face like he wants to poop or something and then, after a beat, when nothing at all happens, he groans loudly. “Allison has my power, shit.”  

Diego hums sympathetically. “Sucks, bro”  

“Diego” Five says “I’m taking your car” and then he just walks out of the room without waiting for a response.  

“Hey!” Diego runs after him, “You’re not taking my car”   

He manages to catch Five in the foyer, and only because the rest of their siblings are already standing there, blocking the door.  

“Where do you think you’re going?” Five asks them.  

Klaus steps forward and does a twirl, he’s wearing a black dress with tons of studs sown in the hems- a very mid-two-thousand’s style, Diego is pretty sure it used to be Allison’s. “We’re taking our dearest sister Vanya our for ice-cream” he explains.  

Five groans. “Fine, now you’re taking your dearest sister Vanya out to commit murder” he says, and then he pushes past them towards the street.  

“Uh, what is he talking about?” Vanya asks.  

“Hazel and Cha-Cha” Diego says. He watches as Klaus’ expression hardens into something unreadable and _fuck_ , he really doesn’t want to know exactly what those fuckers did to his brother, what they did to Eudora.  

“C’mon” he urges them. “We can get ice-cream afterwards”  


	3. Did I kill her?

They end up piling up in an old van from the garage because Diego’s car isn’t big enough for six people (seven, if Ben doesn’t want to sit right through someone’s lap). It’s the one dad bought specifically to drive them to and from missions, when they were kids, and when Diego sits in the leather seats and stares at his siblings’ thirteen years old faces, most of them dressed in their school uniforms- he feels like he stepped right into a time machine.  

Except this time around it’s not dad at the wheel, it’s Five- driving like a maniac and running over a couple of mailboxes. Diego sighs in relief when Five parks across the street from the motel where Hazel and Cha-Cha are staying, because he honest to god thought that Five might make them crash and die.  

“So what’s the plan?” Diego asks, eyeing the sketchy motel through the van’s window.  

“The plan is, you wait in here while I take them out” Five says, and he goes to step outside but that’s so incredibly _dumb_.

“Five, for god’s sake” Diego says. “We’re all here, let us help you”

“I’m trained.” Five says simply, “You aren’t”

“Uh, don’t know if you remember, Five, buddy,” Klaus starts, “But daddy dearest traded our childhood for some good old-fashioned military grade training”

Five glares.  

But Klaus is right, _dammit,_ and Diego watches happily as he continues. “I mean, I’d rather never ever step foot inside that room again-” Klaus gestures towards the motel. “But if you couldn’t kick their asses last time around, maybe, just maybe, you won’t be able to kick their asses now”  

“I meant trained by the commission” Five says dryly.  “These guys aren’t some random goons, they’re good”

And yeah, yeah, they’re good. They managed kill _Eudora,_ and Eudora was always one tough son of a bitch. But then again, Diego thinks, Eudora wasn’t enhanced, like them, she wasn’t trained since the day she was born.  

And Diego could’ve killed Cha-Cha, if he wanted to.  

Diego takes a deep breath. “I could’ve taken down Cha-Cha before, in the theatre” he says tentatively, swallowing the lump in his throat at the thought of Eudora, because _sure,_ Hazel and Cha-Cha are good. But Diego’s better.  

“Cha-Cha was already compromised when you fought her” Five says bluntly, simply. “Now she won’t be _and_ she’ll have Hazel”  

“All the more reason for us to help you” Diego replies, trying very hard to not give in to the urge to smack Five’s head for even suggesting that Diego can’t take down two stupid little serial killers.  “Besides, you don’t have your power”

“Neither do you” Five answers. “You’re staying in the car”

*

They don’t stay in the car.  

Instead, the follow Five through the halls of the motel (and just how dumb must they look? a bunch of kids just running around like they own the place?) until they find the right door and then all hell breaks loose.  

It starts when Luther squares his shoulders and puffs up his chest. “I can kick open the door” he announces, with a deadly determination as soon as they’re standing close together, crowded around the door.  

“Luther, I don’t think-” Allison starts saying, but Luther’s foot is already halfway through the air and Diego doesn’t even have time to call him an idiot before his foot connects with the door.  

The door, predictably, doesn’t even budge.  

However, it does make a loud and dull sound that Diego doesn’t like one bit, because he could hear the low murmur of a tv coming from somewhere inside the room and now it’s just _quiet._  

“Luther, you idiot” Five says, through gritted teeth. Their element of surprise is ruined. Gone. Dead. Thank you very much, Luther.  

“Wait, I can do it again” Luther says desperately, and he goes to kick the door again-  

But Diego manages to grasp his leg and push it down. “ _Don’t_ ”  

Luther glares and almost fucking _pouts,_ and jesus christ, what’s wrong with Diego’s family?  

“Maybe, I can-” Vanya murmurs quietly, stepping forwards and Diego suddenly remembers that she literally has never been on a mission before. Ever. Not even once.  

Shit, maybe _she_ should’ve waited in the car. Vanya lifts a hand and places it gently against the door, she pushes once, twice and then the door swings open.  

Half a second later, someone yells “ _Duck!_ ” and, well, when someone yells duck, Diego ducks. He drops to the ground along with his siblings and just barely avoids getting shot. Fuck, the bastards don’t even know they’re the umbrella academy, they just saw a bunch of children and started shooting blindly- what the fuck.  

Diego lifts his head up in time to see Five pull a gun from literally nowhere and start shooting too. He can only see Cha-Cha, Hazel’s god knows where and _shit_ , they’re not alone.   

The room is full of ghosts.  

Most of them look- _bad._ Creepy, disgusting, incredibly bad _._  They’re the kind of ghosts from the b-rated movies that Eudora loved and made him watch religiously but that he _hated, hated, hated._ And they’re just standing around with torn fingernails, and broken bones, and gunshots, and bruises, and, and, and, and-  

They’re victims, Diego realizes. Victims of whatever fucked up shit Hazel and Cha-Cha do to people in their spare time.  

Diego forces himself to tear his eyes away from the ghosts and pay attention to the living, because there are gunshots resonating in his ears and he’s _not_ dying here.  

“Who the fuck are you?” Cha-Cha yells out, and she backs away until she’s standing somewhere in the bathroom, using its walls to take cover from Five’s gun.  

Diego gets up quickly, taking advantage of the fact that while Cha-Cha is inside the bathroom, she won’t be shooting them. He helps everyone off the floor, and gestures Klaus, Vanya, and Allison to take cover outside the room, behind the door.  

“Diego” Allison says urgently, a little mad. “I’m not going to stand back while you-”  

Diego cuts her off with a shushing noise and a hand wave. Of course he doesn’t want her to stand back while they do all the work. Allison’s damn good, Diego knows that, and he’d want nothing more than to have her fighting at his side, but-  

“Just-” Diego gestures meaningfully towards Klaus and Vanya, standing side by side and looking like they would like to be literally anywhere else in the world. They’re Diego’s brother and sister, and he loves them- but if they’re going to end up dead if they’re left alone.  

Allison gets it. “Oh,” she says “Yeah, ok”  

Klaus gasps mockingly, and Vanya chokes out a little laugh. “You wound me, brother of mine, you wound me. I’ll have you know I’m a war veteran” he says “I could take you both down right in this very second” but he doesn’t move from his safe spot, sandwiched between Allison and Vanya’s shoulders. And yeah, _Vietnam-_ it’s impressive, Diego will admit that much, but it doesn’t mean Klaus doesn’t need a babysitter.   

Diego scowls and leaves Klaus to think about his glory days by himself, he’s got more pressing manners. He turns around and stalks into the room, where Luther and Ben (and a shit-ton of ghosts) are already behind Five’s heels.  

“Come out, Cha-Cha" Five says. “Let’s get this over with”

Cha-Cha doesn’t answer- instead, she peeks through the bathroom’s door and shoots once, quick and precise enough that Diego doesn’t really register the movement or sound of the shot in his mind until he sees Five grunting in pain and wavering in his feet.

Diego freezes.

He freezes and he sort of wants to scream because _what the fuck_ \- he’s going to kill Cha-Cha himself; he’s going to kill her and he’s going to make sure that it _hurts,_ that she suffers.  

Luther runs forwards, hovering all over Five- and _shit_ , Diego can see blood pooling in Five’s shirt, somewhere near his left shoulder, deep red and angry and it makes him look like one of the ghosts lurking around them and Diego’s thinking _shit, shit, shit, shit-_  

“Hey!” Ben says, almost yelling and standing way too close to Diego’s face. “Snap out of it!”  

Diego blinks.  

He doesn’t like the sight of blood.

He doesn’t like the sight of blood which is just _ridiculous_ , considering that he’s been dealing with blood ever since he was a kid (stab wounds mostly, people bleed when you stab them and Diego’s stabbed half of the city at this point of his life). He’s dealt with blood since forever but it makes him feel dizzy, uncomfortable, lightheaded- especially when the blood is coming from someone he actually cares about.  

He cares about Five.  

They just got him back and Diego does not like the blood pooling in his shirt or the way he’s wobbling on his feet or the fact that Luther is clutching Five’s arm and barely holding him upright.  

Diego nods jerkily at Ben, if anything, just to get his concerned expression out of his line of sight- and when Ben steps aside, Diego takes a deep breath and makes up his mind about adding another number to list of people he’s stabbed.  

He walks slowly towards the bathroom, and nobody but Ben notices him, Allison, Klaus and Vanya taking cover, Five too distracted with his wound and Luther with making sure Five doesn’t pass out-  

“Diego, that’s not a good idea, c’mon” Ben says.  

And maybe he’s right, she _does_ have a gun, whereas Diego only has a bunch of knives and an insane amount of determination, but he doesn’t care. He walks, and when he’s close enough to the bathroom he sprints inside as fucking fast as he can and manages to grab a hold of Cha-Cha’s wrist right before she shoots him.  

He holds her arm tight and angles the gun away from his face to the best of his ability while she presses the trigger one, two, three times, the sound echoing around his skull- and _fuck_ , he forgot he’s been walking around in the body of a thirteen year old, she’s taller, bigger and definitely stronger than him.  

“Diego!” Luther’s voice screams, followed by approaching footsteps and Diego would be touched, really, that Luther actually cares about him enough to leave Five’s side to coming running to save him. But he’s a little busy trying not get his face blown off.  

Luther appears in the bathroom’s doorway and Cha-Cha turns to look at him. Of course, that gives Diego the amazing opportunity to do what he does best-

He fights dirty. Diego takes the momentum and brings his knee up with all the strength he can muster and then he does it again, and again, and again, and when Luther stands behind her and grabs her into a complicated headlock, Diego slaps the gun right out of her hands and kicks it where she can’t reach it.  

“Guys?” Allison calls out, and suddenly, in a wave of blue light, she’s standing right next to him. She’s grasping both Klaus and Vanya’s shoulders and they all stumble wildly when then land, cramped up in the tiny bathroom. Klaus makes a face at Cha-Cha, still struggling between both Luther and Diego’s grip.  

“I think,” Allison says, and she’s taking big gulps up air. She’s probably dizzy- Diego remembers Five straight up refusing to zap them all at the same time when they were kids, always said something about it feeling like a hurricane went through his brain. “I think Hazel’s coming; we saw him park” she says, and that’s not good.  

“Shit” Diego says. Cha-Cha kicks him in the groin and Diego swallows down a whimper, but he does _not_ let go of her arm-  

“What the hell?” someone says, from somewhere outside the bathroom. It’s got to be Hazel.  

Diego, and probably the rest of his siblings too, suddenly realizes that they left Five alone, alone with a gunshot and just a flimsy little gun to defend himself with. Fuck, they’re all shit, Diego’s shit.  

“Are you kidding me?” Ben says, glaring down at everyone. “You just left him there?”  

Diego huffs. “Well, if you’re mister perfect why don’t you-?”

“I’m dead” Ben says, and _oh_ , yeah, right.

“Can you-?” Luther asks, completely ignoring the fact that Diego’s having a conversation, _dammit_ , and looking worriedly between Cha-Cha and towards where Five and Hazel are.  

Diego nods. “Yeah, go” he says, because Luther’s been holding Cha-Cha in a chokehold and she’s kicking less and less- taking her out while she’s like this would be stupidly easy. Diego could do it with a hand tied behind his back.   

Luther let’s go of Cha-Cha's neck and while she’s struggling to breathe again, Diego swoops in and takes her neck into another chokehold. He would stab her, really, but Vanya’s standing right there and she’s the only one of them who doesn’t have any experience with first degree murder. Diego doesn’t want to traumatize her.  

Both Luther and Allison walk away from the bathroom, and as soon as they step outside, Diego can hear them yelling, kicking, punching-  

He tightens his grasp on Cha-Cha's neck, hoping that he can knock her out and be done with it- when, suddenly, she does- _something._  

She does something and the next thing he knows, Diego’s lying flat on his back and Cha-Cha's face is two inches away from his. “Fuck” Diego says, and that’s all he has time to say before she’s punching him, hard, again and again- and _fuck_ , fuck, his nose feels broken.  

“Hey, _bitch!_ ” Klaus yells out and then he’s ramming a- shampoo bottle or something, Diego can’t get a good look, into Cha-Cha's head. _I’m a war veteran, my ass_ , Diego thinks, because that doesn’t seem like the sort of move a war veteran would pull. Or maybe it is, who the hell knows, Diego’s never been to war.  

Cha-Cha stumbles and Diego wants to push her off of him but dammit, he’s a goddamned thirteen year old- he's a scrawny, small, and weak thirteen year old, and he can only watch as Cha-Cha kicks out a leg and hits Klaus’ knees until he’s falling back on his ass and hitting the back of his head on the bathroom’s sink.  

“Klaus!” both Ben and Vanya yell out, and then Ben’s kneeling next to him-  

Cha-Cha wraps her hands around Diego’s neck and she starts _squeezing_ , and Diego, Diego expects it to feel like it always does when Luther chokes him while they’re fighting. He expects it to feel tight, and uncomfortable, maybe uncomfortable enough to leave a nasty bruise and to feel it for days. What he doesn’t expect though, is for Cha-Cha's hands to cut off his goddamned _breathing_.

The thought that _this_ power went away along with his aim, never crossed Diego’s mind. Being able to hold his breath just never felt like it was a something special, it’s just part of himself and now he _can’t breathe_. The feeling is foreign and unexpected and Diego doesn’t like it.  

He clutches desperately at Cha-Cha's hands, at his own throat- _he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe_ \-   

“No, stop!” Vanya says, but her voice feels far away.  

Diego’s vision starts to blur at edges and he watches detachedly as a bullet flies through the wall and shatters the bathroom’s mirror. Who the hell knows what Luther and Allison are doing?  

“Diego, fuck, don’t give up!”  

Ben.  

It’s Ben this time.  

But Diego can’t _breathe_.

Suddenly, suddenly, Vanya’s pushing hard at Cha-Cha’s shoulders, she goes flying across the room, crashing into the shower and the pressure is gone from Diego’s neck.  

He wheezes.  

He wheezes and he coughs and he sputters and it’s fucking _embarrassing,_ but, fuck, _damnit_ , Diego doesn’t even care. “Thank you, thank you” he manages to say, but his voice sounds raspy and his throat burns and Diego wants his own powers back.  

Vanya helps him up, and he feels lightheaded. He might have a concussion. Huh.  

Klaus is already up and pocking at Cha-Cha with his foot. She’s sprawled out in the shower, her neck bent into an awkward angle and-

“Oh god,” Vanya says, “Is she dead? Did I kill her?”

She looks horrified and Diego kind of wants to kindly ask her if she remembers two days ago, when she exploded the world and killed everyone, including mom and pogo- but he decides it’s probably not the best time.

“Looks dead to me,” Klaus shrugs casually, and then smiles big at Vanya with a pretty see through nonchalance. “And that’s a good thing, sister, dear! You just killed the lady who tortured me for two days straight!”

“Oh,” Vanya says shakily. “Ok, that’s- good”

Diego decides to stop wasting time and he walks out into the room-  

Hazel’s laying on the floor, Allison straddling him and holding his legs, Luther his torso, and Five, _Five,_ who’s bleeding and looks like he’s two seconds away from passing out, is holding a gun to Hazel’s temple.  

At least he’s alive.  

Five pulls the trigger and Diego’s ready to see fucking brain matter splatter everywhere, but- nothing happens. Five pulls it again, and again, and nothing happens.  

“Damnit” Five mutters, and he stumbles the couple steps to where Diego’s standing. “Where’s Cha-Cha's gun?”  

“Uh,” Diego starts, but he doesn’t know where the gun is, he just kicked it out of the way and forgot about it. “It’s gotta be somewhere in here”

Five huffs and turns back around, clutching his bloody shoulder a little more forcefully than Diego would do. “It’s your lucky day, Hazel, you get to choose a fun way to die. I’m personally fond of strangulation” Five says, like he’s discussing the weather. “But I’m not opposed to different ideas”

Hazel opens his eyes comically wildly. “You’re fucking insane”  

Five hums, low in his throat. “I’ve been told”

And yeah, Five’s a little fucked up, but Diego honestly doesn’t think Hazel is a position to say so- not with all the ghosts of his victims lurking around him. They’re driving Diego _crazy;_ they just won’t shut up.  

_(“She chopped my hands off and let me to bleed in the bathtub!)_

_(“They slashed my throat!”)_

_(“She put a pillow over my face!”)_

_(“He ran me over! Forward, reverse, forward reverse-!)_

Diego doesn’t know what the fuck the ghosts want him to do about it.  

He wanders across the room, because turning back around and watching Klaus and Vanya’s horrified expressions isn’t fun, either. There’s a box of donuts in the ground, from _Griddy’s_ of all places- it's a little squished, the donuts probably done for, but something catches Diego’s eye.  

It’s the receipt, for the donuts, clearly written by Agnes, the nice waiter that’s worked there forever and always gave them free little somethings when they were kids, and written on the side it says, in her loopy handwriting: ‘ _hope to see you around’_  followed by the rough drawing of a winking face with a bunch of hearts around it and, oh, _oh_ , she’s into _Hazel_.  

Diego turns around just in time to catch Five about to put a pillow over Hazel’s face. “Hey, hold on” Diego says, and walks until he’s almost shoving the receipt into Hazel’s face. “What’s this?” he asks.

Hazel stops squirming, stays deadly still and looks at Diego straight in the eye. “Don’t hurt her” he says simply, but it doesn’t sound like he’s begging, it’s more of threat. Diego feels threatened. Or he would, anyways, if Hazel wasn’t pinned to the floor.  

Five smirks, like someone gave him a pony for Christmas. “Ah,” he says. “There’s a lady”  

“ _Don’t hurt her_ ” Hazel repeats. And suddenly he’s throwing both Luther and Allison off of him and Diego barely has time to grab one of his knives from its holster and throw it at Hazel.  

The knife fucking-  

It hits Hazel square the chest but it doesn’t go as Diego pictured it. It’s the _handle_ that hits him, the fucking _handle._ Diego’s standing five feet away from Hazel and he couldn’t even make the shot, the stupidly simple and easy shot that he’s pretty sure even a toddler could make, _what the fuck,_ he’s useless-

The knife clanks loudly to the floor and maybe Diego shouldn’t have thrown it in the first place, because Hazel kneels down immediately and grabs it. He stagers back, towards the door and towards where Klaus is standing-  

And he grabs Klaus, holds him tight to his body and pushes the knife sharply into Klaus’ neck.  

And shit, shit, shit. “Oh, christ on a cracker, not _again_ ” Klaus yells out, squirming and causing the knife to dig deeper into his neck and draw a little bit of blood. Diego keeps his knives _sharp._  

“This is what we’re going to do” Hazel says, “I leave your friend alone, and you leave _my_ friend alone”

Diego glances around the room. All of his siblings are staring worriedly at the scene, even the goddamned ghosts are staring-  

“And what, then we let you go?” Luther asks, all cold eyes and murderous look.  

“Yes” Hazel says. “Or you say goodbye”  

“No one’s saying goodbye but you” Five says, walking towards Hazel and Klaus.  

Diego can tell that Hazel’s grip on Klaus’ shoulders tightens, and he sort of wants to throw another knife but he knows, he _knows_ it won’t work- he needs to stick to close distance stabbing for now.  

“Stand back” Hazel barks out.  

Five doesn’t stand back, if anything, he quickens his pace and for a terrible, horrible second, Diego thinks that Hazel’s actually going to use the knife on Klaus- to hurt him, to kill him- but then he just spins it around in his hand and uses the blunt end to draw an angry line in Klaus’ neck.  

It doesn’t even draw blood.

But apparently Five doesn’t care whether there’s blood involved or not. He fucking hisses and clenches his fists, and then the entire goddamned motel starts _shaking._ Shaking and swaying, the windows shatter, and Five, Five just stands there-  

Diego decides he doesn’t want another apocalypse. “Five” he says. “Five, watch it”

“Five?” Hazel asks, frowning and seemingly unperturbed by the goddamned earthquake that Five is causing. “You’re Five? You’re just a kid”

“I’m not a-”  

“Yes, _yes_ -” Klaus interrupts. “We’re kids! We’re all teeny tiny little kids, and we’ve never done anything wrong in our short, short lives, ever! Pinkie swear”  

Hazel’s grip on Klaus loosens. “Where’s Cha-Cha?”  

Vanya makes a choked noise.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know why this is so long?? i didn't even finish the scene?? sorry 💔


	4. License and registration?

Turns out, Hazel’s not into killing children.  

And, well-  

Diego’s honestly kind of surprised. It’s not quite sure what he was expecting, not after seeing the number of angry and mutilated ghosts trailing behind him- but _hey_ , everyone has a line they won’t cross, right?  

“I still don’t think this is a good idea” Five says, sitting on the edge of one of the motel room’s beds and pressing down on to his bloody shoulder with Vanya’s scrunched up blazer while she clutches his free hand a little desperately. “Maybe we should just kill Hazel”  

Allison sits beside them and Vanya holds one of her hands too. “Maybe, but you said the commission-”

“The commission,” Five interrupts. “Is just a bunch of sadistic bastards who want the world to go down in flames and they’re going to be after us, no matter what we do” he gets up from the bed, and throws the bloody blazer to the floor. “But if the commission realizes that we’re strong enough to take down their hitmen; then they’re not going to wait around like last time, they’re going to send the tac team that almost killed us as soon as they realize Hazel and Cha-Cha are dead”

“So we shouldn’t kill Hazel?” Luther asks.  

Five sighs. “Hazel’s a hazard and we can’t trust him. I think we should ignore the commission for now and kill him anyways”  

Diego opens his mouth to speak, but then he stops. He doesn’t know whether to agree with Five or not, because Five’s right-  

Hazel’s definitely a hazard.  

The guy’s a goddamned _hitman_ , and that alone would make Diego distrusts him, fear him, and Diego still wants to straight up murder him for what he and Cha-Cha did to Eudora _(and Klaus and Five and the ghost with the broken fingers and the one with a sliced throat and the one who was run over and the one with-)_  

Diego wants him dead. And he was going to kill him, he had the chance. He was going to walk up to Hazel, pull out a knife and kill him dead. But then.

But then when Hazel was holding Klaus hostage and he heard the news that Cha-Cha was maybe, probably, ( _definitely_ ) dead and it was a bunch of thirteen-year-olds that offed her, Hazel just stopped. He let go of Klaus and Diego’s knife and he ran over to the bathroom to see Cha-Cha and Diego felt like killing the guy while he was kneeling in a dirty bathroom was a bit of a jerk move.  Even for him.

And his siblings must have thought that too, because they just stood there uselessly until Hazel came back and demanded an explanation, and when they gave him one, he just nodded jerkily, and said he would help them.  

Which-  

Diego doesn’t buy it.  

He doesn’t buy it because he’s had random people breaking into his home and going trigger happy on people he cares about and it’s _not_ fun. It’s scary and awful and the worst thing that can possibly happen to a person and Diego doesn’t think that giving the killers a pat on the back and offering them help is an appropriate reaction. It’s not what he’d do, what he’s done.  

Although, Diego’s never been attacked by children before. Who knows how he’d react?

And, anyways, he figures that their impromptu story time with Hazel must have changed his perspective of a couple things. Like, the apocalypse, for example. Hazel’s a citizen of planet earth, and whether he likes it or not, Diego thinks the guy might want to help them keep the world standing.  

So, Diego’s having second thoughts about killing him. “I don’t know, Five. If he could keep the commission off our backs for a while then he’s useful”  

“Yeah, Diego’s right” Allison says. “If he can keep the tac team away, we need him- I don’t think any of us want to repeat that whole thing in the bowling alley and the theatre”

Five glares, the asshole. “I agree that those weren’t _optimal_ circumstances, but-”

“Oh, c’mon” Diego interrupts him. “They could’ve killed us”

Luther nods. “If it weren’t for Ben, we’d be dead”

“ _Excuse-moi_ ,” Klaus says indignantly, “And with whose help did Ben give us that glorious sea-show performance?”  

Luther blinks, and then he frowns like he honest to god doesn’t know the answer to Klaus’ question and it takes Diego all of his willpower not to burst out laughing when Ben walks towards Luther and mimics smacking the back of his head with an annoyed expression on his face.

“Guys,” Five says, with an exasperated sigh. “Focus. Do you or do you not want to kill Hazel”

“Hazel’s right here” Hazel says loudly, and _jesus christ_ , Diego had almost forgotten he was here. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t discuss whether you want me to live or die while I’m-”  

“This doesn’t concern you” Five retorts, staring as Hazel carries Cha-Cha's body from the bathroom and places it gently in the empty bed. “If it were only up to me, you’d be dead right now, just like Cha-Cha”  

“Cha-Cha isn’t dead” Hazel announces proudly, and _what the fuck_. “She’s unconscious”  

Diego turns to look at Klaus, because Klaus is the one who said she was dead and-  

“Don’t look at me!” Klaus says, his voice high and almost apologetic, except that Diego knows that his brother has never felt sorry about anything in his life. “I just said she _looked_ dead”  

Five huffs. “Fine, we’re killing her now”  

“You’re _not_ killing her” Hazel says.  

 

*

 

At the end of the day, it happens like this.  

Hazel says he’s going to help them.  

He says he’s going to keep Cha-Cha busy _,_ to keep her going after cold trails and dead ends for as long as he can and he’s going to make sure the commission doesn’t send anyone but Cha-Cha and him after them.

Diego doesn’t really understand why.

It’s probably because they look like they’re fresh out of middle school and killing them would be a little bit too much for Hazel’s conscience, even after they explained they’re actually getting closer and closer to turning thirty (or to turning _sixty_. That’s another thing Diego can’t quite wrap his mind around). Or maybe it’s because Hazel wants to run off with Agnes and live happily ever after, or maybe it’s because he was already doubting the commission’s orders, since way before they arrived.  

Diego decides it’s not his problem.  

Whatever motivation Hazel might have, he can take it to his grave if he wants to. So, Diego decides to keep his mouth shut and stand aside when Hazel pulls out a briefcase from the room’s air vents and shoves it at them.  

The briefcase is big and black and unassuming and Diego’s about to ask what’s inside but then. But then Klaus flinches back and away from the thing as soon as he sees it. But then Five gets that slightly creepy and definitely mischievous glint in his eyes.  

So Hazel gives them a time-traveling magic briefcase in exchange for his and Cha-Cha’s (and the rest of the world’s) lives.  

Diego thinks it’s a pretty good deal.  

 

*

 

“Klaus, we’re not stopping for ice-cream. Five’s literally bleeding out” Diego says and gestures towards the copilot’s seat where Five’s sitting, still bleeding but somehow clutching the briefcase to his chest like a madman.  

Five groans. “I’m fine”  

Diego takes his eyes off the road for a second, enough to give Five a _look_ . He hopes it conveys something like “ _You’re not fine. Shut up and focus on not dying_ ”

“See?” Klaus says, poking his head through the seats and patting Five’s head awkwardly while he tries to push him away. “He’s totally fine!”  

“Klaus, for god’s sake” Diego says, because Klaus’ head is completely blocking his view of the van’s window and he can’t fucking drive like that. “Sit back”  

Klaus pouts obnoxiously and sticks his tongue out at Diego, but he does sit back and Diego decides to count it as a win. “You’re not fun” Klaus says.  

And then, after a beat, “Uh-oh”  

And that’s-  

That’s never a good sign, especially when it’s coming from Klaus.  

“ _Uh-oh_ , what?” Diego calls back.  

“Oh, shit-” Vanya says, and Diego starts to get worried.

“What is it?” Diego asks, but then he looks at his rearview mirror and sees what they mean. There’s a goddamned police vehicle following them closely, sirens flickering red and blue at full force and everything. “Shit” he says.  

“Do something!”  

Diego does what any sane person would do.  

He pushes down on to the acceleration pedal as hard as he can, and it’s- it’s a dumb move, he knows it’s a dumb move, and Luther lets him know it’s a dumb move ( _“What the fuck Diego! Pull over!”_ ) but Diego’s spent exactly one afternoon jailed in a sad little cell after being accused of murdering _Eudora_ of all things and that afternoon was enough for him. He’s pretty sure they’re all getting detained if the cops see them all bloody and dirty and driving a van that they can’t prove is theirs. And also, they look like they’re thirteen.  

The police car behind them goes faster to match Diego’s pace and Diego tries to go even _faster,_ but the stupid van is at its limit- Diego drives and drives and drives and he thinks about how weird it is that he’s never actually been part of an actual car chase until now and he’s ignoring his siblings’ straight up screaming about how he’s going to kill them all with his reckless driving-  

_(Stop the fucking car!)_

_(Diego, I swear to god-)_

_(At least we’ll die as a family)_

-when, suddenly, Luther is squeezing his entire torso in the space between the front seats and pulling at the handbrake up. “Luther, what the _fuck_ do you think you’re-” and it’s all Diego has time to say before the van is swirling dangerously and he’s losing control of it.  

And, contrary to what they may believe, Diego doesn’t actually want to kill his siblings in a car wreck. So, he pushes the brakes down even if what he really wants to do is to drive, drive, drive and lose the cops and go home and maybe take a bath.  

“Luther, what the fuck!” Diego yells, when van comes to a stop, and he tries to push Luther away from where he is half laying on top of the handbrake, but Luther doesn’t move an inch. “I was about to lose them!”  

Luther glares. “You were about to crash the car and kill us all!”  

“No, I wasn’t” he says, because Diego was _not_ going to crash the car and kill them all. He’s a good driver, he’s got a chauffeur license and everything.  

“Y’know,” Ben says, from somewhere in the back. “I’m pretty fine with being the only dead one, Diego” Diego groans and smacks his forehead on the steering wheel, because he _wasn’t_ going to kill them, dammit.  

Someone knocks on the windows one, two, three times and Diego takes a deep breath before looking up and slowly rolling the window down.  

It’s the cop that was following them. It’s a young guy, somewhere in his mid-twenties and Diego thinks he’s probably seen him around before, bothering Eudora with a thousand questions about her job. He’s a rookie.  

“What?” Diego asks, point and simple because he just _knows_ they’re getting arrested.  

The cop blinks a couple times. “Uh,” he starts, and takes out flashlight to get a good look at them.  

Diego knows they must look somewhat startling, and if he were in the cop’s shoes he’d be pulling handcuffs out already; because Five’s bleeding, and Luther’s halfway between the back and front seats and Diego’s right eye is sporting what he’s sure is going to become the biggest bruise that ever existed and there’s a bunch of children in the backseat.  

“License and registration?”  


	5. That's new

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heeyyyy.... sorry for the wait

“It’s alright children,” the aggressively nice detective that the police station assigned to them says. Diego’s pretty sure the guy introduced himself at some point but he honestly can’t remember what his name is.  “I just need to know your last names so I can tell your parents you’re safe. They must be worried sick about you”

Klaus chokes out a muffled laugh, and the detective takes it as an invitation to direct his speech at him. “C’mon, don’t tell me your old man isn’t searching heaven and hell to find you right now.”  

Klaus shudders. “Oh god, I sure fucking hope not”

“He’d better moved on to the other side already” Ben says, almost at the same time as Klaus, looking around the room as if he expects dad to pop up from somewhere.

The cop who detained them walks into the room, starts asking questions to the detective and Diego wants to tune it out because it’s _boring_ and he just wants to go home and sleep off his headache and-  

“And what about the briefcase?” the detective asks, and Diego perks up and _listens_ , because as soon as they arrived to the police station, a bunch of cops wrestled the briefcase out Five’s hands right before dragging him out and into an ambulance, and-

Well.

Diego’s not that worried about his brother because he knows Five’s a tough son of a bitch and the bullet didn’t go through anything too important anyways. He’ll be fine. Diego knows he’ll be fine.

What he doesn’t know, is what the hell happened to the briefcase. So, he listens closely.  

“Look, look, the briefcase’s still unopened in the evidence room, but we confiscated it, along with two discontinued illegal firearms, a marijuana cigar and-” the cop glances at Diego’s direction with a nervous look, and when he speaks again, he’s almost whispering. “And we found twenty-seven throwing knives on the Mexican kid.”   

Diego doesn’t know whether to feel offended about the fact that he just assumed he’s Mexican or the fact that he thinks that Diego only had _twenty-seven_ knives on him.  

 

*

 

They leave them alone after that, probably so they can go and fill their paperwork and try to figure out what to do with them. Diego almost feels sorry for the poor assholes assigned to their case.  

“What do we do now?” Allison asks, from where she’s sitting in the tiny couch of the interrogation room that the detective shoved them in. He didn’t even put them in a holding cell, Diego’s kind of offended.  

Luther stands up and starts pacing, checking every corner of the room. “I don’t know” he says, and he probably means it.  

Diego sighs. He figures out of all of them, Luther’s got to be the one who’s most opposed to breaking out of jail. Something about never breaking the rules, no matter how stupid they are. It’s not a problem for Diego, though. He’s broken out of jail before.

“We gotta be smart about this” Diego says, trying to think up the least dangerous way to do it. “We need a plan”

“Oh, I know” Klaus says, and he leans into Vanya until she’s pressed into a corner of the couch. “Sister, dear?” he says, gesturing towards the very locked door. “Could you be a sweetheart and punch that thing until the hinges go flying, so we can ride off into the sunset?”  

Vanya nods and goes to stand up but that’s just-  

 _No._  

“No,” Diego says. “You open that door and we have to fight our way out of here”  

Both Vanya and Klaus blink like they don’t understand and _jesus_ , they’re just clueless, aren’t they?

“Cops” Diego says. “This place is full of cops. We can’t just walk out of the front door and I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t feel like going against an entire police station”  

“Oh, ok” Vanya says, while Klaus waves his hands dismissively.  

Allison huffs. “Ok, so what do we do?”

 _Good fucking question_ , Diego thinks.  

They sit in silence for a while, and Diego can’t figure out what to do. Maybe Allison can zap them out (but she can’t, five people would be too much for her) or maybe they can get mom to forge some birth certificates or something and she can get them out (but they wouldn’t let them out anyways, they’d just have a legal guardian _and_ be arrested) or maybe-

“Diego,” Luther says loudly, startling him out of thoughts. He walks up to him, and Diego can clearly see that one of his eyes is twitching. “This is your fault”

“You’re the one who-”

“No,” Luther interrupts. “Don’t try to blame me”

Luther’s getting angry now, and Diego knows, deep down, that that’s just how Luther deals with his problems, by throwing punches and mean words.  

“Don’t blame you?” Diego echoes. He tries to keep his voice down, to keep himself from matching Luther’s rage. “Luther, even if hadn’t sped off the stupid cop would’ve arrested us. I was just trying to lose him”

“We weren’t doing anything illegal until you did that!” Luther says, clenching his fists and getting into Diego’s space. “We shouldn’t even be here!”  

And now Diego wants to punch him too.  

“Luther, you-”

“Boys!” Allison says, placing a hand on each of their chests and squeezing herself between them. “Calm down. We need to figure out how to get out of this one”  

Diego takes a deep breath. “You got any suggestions?”

“Actually, yes” she says. “I think this would be a great time for you guys to figure out who has my rumours” Allison says sharply, gesturing towards Klaus and Luther.

“Fine,” Luther says quickly, too quickly, and then he turns to look at Diego. “I heard a rumour that your dick fell off!”  

“ _Luther!_ ” Allison squeaks out and Diego sucks in a breath, because-

It’s-  

 _Fuck._  

Diego doesn’t know if Allison's power works like that, if it can do- if it can mould and shape reality just as easily as it moulds people’s thoughts and minds. He realises, staring at Allison’s bewildered face, that she doesn’t know either.  

Diego does _not_ want to find out.

He decides to focus on his siblings. They’re all staring at him with wide eyes and even _Luther_ looks kind of worried and that’s never a good sign.  

“Is it-” Klaus starts. “Is it gone?”

“I don’t know” Diego says, because he doesn’t. He doesn’t feel any different but-  

Who the fuck knows if his dick is still where it supposed to be? It wouldn’t even be the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to him.  

Diego grabs the elastic of his of his stupid school boy shorts and lifts the hem slowly to peek inside. He pauses to watch as his siblings’ gazes follow his movement and slowly trail down to his crotch, until everyone is expectantly waiting for the verdict.  

Diego’s sort of scared to look.  

He arms himself with some non-existent courage, looking down before he can back off and-  

“Oh, thank god” he says, exhaling a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.  

It’s there, his dick is _there_.  

Allison turns to Luther and punches his arm.  “Luther, what the hell? You could’ve-”

“Well,” Klaus interrupts cheerily, with that terrifying grin of his.  “Since that didn’t do anything at all-” and oh, _oh_. “It’s my time to shine, baby!”  

“I heard a rumor-” Klaus starts, and Diego shares a concerned look with Ben because he realizes that whatever comes out of Klaus’ mouth will be, somehow, simultaneously incredibly stupid and incredibly dangerous. He braces himself for the worst.  

But then, Klaus stops. “Wait, hold on. Do you guys hear that or is it just me?”

Diego’s about to say he doesn’t hear anything, because he doesn’t, but then-  

It’s a low-pitched grumbling noise.  

It’s deep and powerful, like a thousand voices whispering, growling and hissing, fighting each other to be heard, to be louder. It makes Diego’s hair stand on end and fills him with an unexplainable dread in the pit of his stomach.  

He’d recognize that noise anywhere.  

“Oh” Ben says. “Oh, that’s not good”

“What?” Vanya asks, looking around wildly. “Where is it coming from?”  

That’s a good question.  

Luther exhales shakily and when Diego turns to look, he has his dress shirt unbuttoned and Diego can clearly see the- _rift_ , in his stomach. Opening and closing, shifting in Luther’s middle until all that remains is the tell-tale patch of nothingness that comes with an interdimensional portal.

A tentacle comes out.  

Luther gasps sharply. “I can’t stop it” he says and for second, everything seems to happen in slow motion. Another tentacle comes out of Luther’s stomach, then another, and another, and another and the next thing Diego knows, the entire room is engulfed in more tentacles than he can count.

“Fuck” Ben says.  

Diego agrees.   

He was always a little afraid of the creature (or _the Horror_ , as dad lovingly nicknamed it for the tabloids) that lived in the other side of those portals. Of Ben’s portals. It made Diego feel a little helpless and small (and definitely squeamish because the thing is _ugly as fuck_ ), and now-  

Now Diego knows what the Horror is truly capable of.  

Years ago, it took control of Ben and played with him like a rag-doll until everything that was left of Diego’s brother to mourn over was a coffin with a barely recognizable corpse.  

The Horror spreads its tentacles slowly, almost like it’s scouting and exploring, making sense of its surroundings and new host. The tentacles crawl through the floors, through the walls, through the ceiling-  

Diego gestures his siblings to stand behind him. It’s dumb, probably, because if the Horror wants them dead, then they’re dead but- he can’t just do nothing.  

“I can’t stop it” Luther repeats and he stumbles a couple steps backwards.  

The tentacles start moving a little more hectically, more desperately and Diego hurries to grab one of the knives the cops didn’t manage to confiscate. He feels useless without his power, Diego and his little knife against a god knows how old eldritch monster.  

“Diego,” Ben says calmly. He’s the only one who didn’t hide behind him. “Diego, you need to help him”

“How?” he whispers, because he doesn’t want the Horror’s attention on him.

“Keep him grounded,” Ben explains. “He needs to focus on something else”

“Something else?” Diego echoes.  

And his voice must have been a little louder than he intended it to be, because one the Horror’s tentacles latches itself around Diego’s middle and lifts him off the ground almost comically quickly.  

Diego does _not_ scream like a little kid.  

“ _Luther!_ ” Diego yells out, and the tentacle squeezes.  

“Fuck, Diego!” Luther says, and yeah, they’re at each other’s throats most of the time but Diego likes to believe that Luther doesn’t actually want to kill him.

The rest of their siblings are standing close together in one of the room’s corners, and Diego realizes with a sigh that that bunch of scaredy cats are his only hope at not being strangled to death by the Horror.

“Hey, hey!” Diego calls to them. “Ben says you need to distract him”  

“Not it!” Klaus says immediately and Diego loses just a tiny bit of hope. Vanya’s shaking and holding on to Klaus’ arm like a lifeline, and that only leaves-  

“Allison, c’mon!”  

Allison squares up her shoulders and steps forwards. ““Luther, you need to calm down”

Luther, predictably, does not calm down.

A second tentacle joins the one that’s holding Diego a couple feet off the ground and it curls itself around his ankles, which. Not good. Definitely not good, because he’s seen those things do the exact same thing to people right before it tears them in half and Diego doesn’t want to be torn in half. He likes being in one piece, it’s nice.  

Diego adjusts his grip on his knife, and considers whether or not it’d be a good idea to try and stab the tentacles when suddenly, the one that’s holding his stomach loosens its grasp on him by a fraction. He turns his head to look down, and sure enough, Allison's standing right next to Luther, talking to him in hushed whispers.  

Diego’s never been happier about being witness to whatever fucked up thing Allison and Luther have going on because Allison says something that startles a laugh out Luther, and all of the sudden both of the tentacles that were holding him let go of Diego at once.  

He falls to the ground with dull thud and watches as some of the tentacles slowly make their way to Allison. They curl around her legs and her wrists, even around her face and Diego can't stop looking because they don’t even look threatening. They’re just kind of- _petting her._  

The Horror’s petting Allison.

“Huh. That’s new” Ben says.  

“Kinky!” Klaus says.  

It’s creepy, that’s what it is. Diego thinks a violent creature from another dimension shouldn’t have any businesses with his sister, because that’s just messed up. Allison’s painfully still and-

The room’s door bursts open and there’s the nice detective from earlier. “Hey, kids,” he’s saying, but then he looks up. “What the fuck?”  

And as if someone flipped a switch, the Horror suddenly stops groping Allison and turns all of its tentacles on him.  

“Run!” Vanya shrieks at him and the detective does the smart thing, and runs. He kicks the door shut behind him and Diego hopes that’s the end of it but of course it isn’t.  

The tentacles start pushing and shoving at the door, at the walls, and the next thing he knows, there’s a goddamned giant hole on the side of the room. It’s big enough to see a bunch of bewildered officers, probably confused as fuck but already standing in high alert next to their desks and pulling guns from their holsters.  

The Horror pushes itself through the hole, looking for the detective and for a terrible second, Diego can clearly picture a scene where it lurches forwards and starts _killing, killing, killing,_ but then-  

 _“No!”_ Luther yells, and the Horror recoils itself back into his body.

There’s a long stretch of silence.  

A couple of the officers have their guns trained on them and Diego can’t even blame them. He spots Beaman and all those other cops and detectives that could’ve been his co-workers in another life, and it’s fucking weird, being around them and not being recognized.

“Now what?” Vanya asks, her voice carefully level.

They need to get out of the police station, and they need to get out _now._ Because Diego’s sure that after seeing those damned tentacles there’s no way the cops are going to treat them like some kids who took their parents’ car for joyride- no, they’re going to remember the stupid glory days of the academy, when dad used them as a circus act and their faces ( _and those tentacles!_ ) were plastered everywhere, and fuck, Diego can’t think of single good way to explain what’s going on.

“Allison, go get the briefcase” he says, because he thinks Five would probably kill them if they lost it.

Allison nods wordlessly and Diego watches out of the corner of his eye as she jumps out of the room in a wave of blue light. The officers’ guns shift to where she was standing.  

The second Allison returns, holding the briefcase to her chest, someone fires a shot.

Diego barely has time to react. He throws himself in her direction, but he’s too far way, he’s too far away and she’s going to shot, but then-  

Luther lets the Horror out once again, and one if its tentacles pushes Allison back and takes the shot for her. And Diego figures the thing won’t like being shot, that it might get angry, but.  

The Horror doesn’t even react.  

The tentacles crawl towards the officers slowly, and Diego decides he doesn’t want to see them tear apart the police station.  

“Luther, c’mon” he says. “Let’s go”

Luther looks far away, though, and Diego starts tugging at his sleeve because they _need_ to get out.  

“Freeze!” someone yells, somewhere to their right and Diego, indeed, freezes.  

There’s something stupidly familiar about that voice and Diego turns around as quickly as humanly possible to face whoever spoke because it can’t be, can it?  

It can’t be Eudora.  

But it is.  

It’s _Eudora_.  

Fuck.  

But she was dead.  

Diego’s a hundred percent sure she was dead, he held her dead body on his arms and she was dead. He doesn’t understand how the fuck she’s here, pointing a gun to his head like it’s just another thursday night and fuck, _fuck_.

A thought occurs to him.

What if she’s dead? What if she’s dead and Diego’s seeing her _ghost_?

“Diego,” Ben says, and it’s like he can read Diego’s mind. “We traveled back in time, remember? Hazel and Cha-Cha didn’t get to her, she’s alive”

Eudora is alive.  


	6. His name was Dave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hey, this is sort of a filler chapter? but i needed these dumb kids to actually have a conversation so there you go ✨✨✨

Eudora is alive.

Diego doesn’t know what to do with this information.  

He stares at her and he knows he looks like a creep, but he can’t help himself, because he thought he’d never see her again and she’s so _beautiful_.  

She’s beautiful, and gorgeous and perfect and all those adjectives she doesn’t like being called and Diego can’t stop staring at her, even when her gun’s still trained in his direction and Luther’s tentacles are flapping wildly all over the place. Vanya’s tugging at his sleeve and-  

One of the tentacles punches itself over and over onto the side of the building and it leaves a giant elephant-sized hole leading straight to the street.

“Scatter!” Klaus yells out, and he takes off running outside without even glancing back. Diego watches as his siblings run after him, taking off in different directions while the cops are distracted.  

Diego takes one last look at Eudora, grabs Luther’s shoulder as his tentacles go back inside and then he runs.  

 

*

 

Diego’s siblings are the worst.  

He knew that already, of course, but.  

But he seriously doesn’t understand how they managed to end up being chased by the police for the better part of a day. They even had to break Five out of a hospital, for god’s sake!  

When Diego works solo there aren’t nearly as many setbacks. Now their faces are splattered all over the news, and Diego doesn’t like the idea of being known as some teenage runaway criminal.  

They got to the academy in the dead of the night, half carrying an almost unconscious Five and a very shaken Luther. Five fucked off somewhere to sleep off the meds he got in the hospital and Luther promised he’d _try_ not to release the Horror while they slept.

And Diego, well, Diego’s far too tired to do anything. He needs to sleep, or else his head is going to explode.

He doesn’t even bother to say goodnight before heading straight to Klaus’ room (because there’s _no_ way he’s sleeping next to the ghost who apparently has been haunting his bedroom since they were kids). He locks the door, and throws himself face first into the bed.

He falls asleep pretty quickly, but of course it doesn’t last. He ends up waking up in the middle of the night plagued with thoughts about Eudora.

Eudora.  

What is he supposed to do, now that he knows that she’s alive?  

He didn’t really get the chance to react, back at the police station; and Eudora didn’t recognize him, anyways. But, god, Diego needs to see her, talk to her, make sure she’s really alive.  

He can’t do that if he’s stuck in the body of a thirteen-year-old. Diego needs Five to fix them, to fix whatever the hell thing his time traveling scheme messed up. He can’t be stuck like this forever, he has a life, for god’s sake! Diego has his shitty boiler room, and his ring fights, and his vigilantism, and he has his almost relationship with Eudora.  

Diego shifts in the bed, feeling more than restless out of the sudden, and he knows for a fact that there’s no way he’s falling back to sleep when his mind is going a mile a minute. _Whatever_ , he thinks, _sleeping is for the weak._  

Maybe he can go and check if anyone’s awake and go bother them, and if there’s no one, he can just go and grab some food or something, anything to avoid thinking about Eudora, or Five’s bullet wound, or the Horror roaming free, or the mysterious briefcase, or the _apocalypse_ \-  

He sighs, and turns around to stand up, but then.  

There’s someone standing next to the bed.

He can’t quite make out their features in the dark but there shouldn’t anyone standing next to the bed. Diego doesn’t like it when there’s random people just watching him sleep, so he pats blindly under his pillow until he finds the knife that he had hidden the night before and he _throws_ it.  

Diego expects the knife to hit its target, but it doesn’t.  

And it’s not like he missed, no, because the intruder is standing two feet away from him and even without his power, Diego isn’t _that_ useless. The knife just kind of phases straight through the person’s chest, which-  

Weird.

“Hey, Diego” the person says with a hint of humor on their voice, and oh, _oh._  

Ok.

Diego’s just stupid and sleep deprived.  

“Jesus christ, Ben!” Diego says, even if his brief freak-out is over. He stretches to turn on the bedside table’s lamp, and that’s all he means to do, but then, with the light, he catches a glimpse of Klaus’ dumb fairy lights and decides to turn them on as well. They’re pretty. “Warn a guy, will you?”  

“Sorry” Ben says, looking like isn’t sorry at all.

It sort of pisses Diego off. “They teach how to lurk in the shadows on ghost 101?”  

“I don’t lurk” Ben makes an annoyed face and Diego realizes a second too late that the whole ghost thing is probably a touchy subject, but- _jesus_ , Ben almost gave him a heart attack, because he absolutely does lurk.  

Diego opens his mouth to tell him so _,_ but Ben gestures him to shut up. And well, Diego’s feeling generous.  “Look,” Ben says. “I need you to-”

Then he stops and frowns, and Diego’s patience’s always been shit. “What?”  

Ben walks closer. “Could you go check on Klaus, please?”  

A thousand scenarios run through his head.  

Klaus, so drunk that he can’t remember his own name. Klaus, high as a kite and itching for more. Klaus, alone in some club. Klaus, laying on a pool of his own vomit. Klaus, crying his eyes out and clawing at his arms.  

 _Klaus, Klaus, Klaus._  

“Where is he?” Diego asks.  

Ben blinks, and he must notice hear the hint of fear in his words.  “It’s nothing like that”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s just- he’s having a nightmare”

A nightmare.  

“Ben,” Diego says slowly because, seriously, a nightmare? What are they, twelve? He tries not to sound too bitter. “Ben, we all have nightmares sometimes”  

“But-” Ben starts, but Diego cuts him off before he can finish. “I’m sure he’ll be fine” Diego says, and he means it.  

Everyone has nightmares. He has nightmares.  

They’re nothing to worry about. Because, sure, you wake up, disoriented and dizzy and it sucks and it hurts and you want to maybe cry or punch something, whichever one comes first. But then you take a deep breath, and then you count to ten, and then the nightmare goes away.  

It’s simple, really.  

“Diego, I get that you’re-” Ben gives him a once over and now Diego’s kind of offended. “You’re _you._ But Klaus isn’t like that, he needs help and it’s not his fault that his entire family is a bunch of assholes”

“Excuse me,” Diego says, and he really should’ve gotten a couple more hours of sleep for this conversation. “The hell do you mean?”  

Ben takes a deep breath, like he honestly has to take a moment to collect himself before speaking. “I mean that he’s not ok, and I’ve been watching him suffer for years and I couldn’t do anything, Diego, anything at all. And I get it, ok? He’s always poisoning himself and throwing his life away and I get that you have trouble taking him seriously, but- Diego, every once in a blue moon Klaus actually asks for help and you always reject him, you push him away, all of you”  

That’s got to be the longest string of words Diego’s ever heard Ben say in a row. “Shit, man” he mutters, because how is he supposed to answer that, anyways?

Ben doesn’t even acknowledge that he spoke. “The one thing I could do for him was wake him up when he was having a nightmare, and now I can’t. I can’t wake him up because he can’t hear me”

Oh.  

He hadn’t really stopped to wonder what life (death) was like for Ben, what it was like for Klaus. At first, he always sort of assumed that Ben had crossed over to the other side or whatever because Klaus never said anything about seeing him and Diego thought that Klaus would consider that something worth mentioning. So, during years and years, Diego never really thought about Ben, not when he pictured Klaus living on the streets, or during his many stints at rehab.  

But, as he processes Ben’s words, he does remember a couple of times, Klaus showing up drunk or high or worse to wherever Diego was staying and demanding food and money. Diego always gave him what he asked for and then sent him on his merry way, and he’d tell himself over and over that he was helping his brother, that he was doing what he could.  

But he wasn’t.

Ben’s right and he was witness to Diego thinking that the epitome of helping a recovering addict was dropping him off in front of a rehab center and not even staying long enough to see whether he walked in or not. Jesus.  

He really is a shit brother, isn’t he?

“Fine,” Diego says, because now he feels guilty. “I’ll go check on Klaus”  

So he goes.

And when he unceremoniously swings open the door to his own bedroom where Klaus is staying, he has to take a step back to avoid gagging because the goddamned ghost is _still_ there. She, somehow, looks even uglier than he remembers her being, with her twisted neck and bloodied face.  

The second she realizes that Diego can see her, she tries to speak. She tries to speak but her neck is broken and she can only make desperate gurgling sounds that he doesn’t want to hear _ever, ever, ever_ -

“Hey, c’mon” Ben says. And just like that, Diego decides to stop looking at the ghost in the corner.  

Klaus is twitching is sleep.  

It’s less like twitching and more like tossing and turning, blindly kicking and swatting at invisible things with a furrowed brow and low moaning. He’s mumbling in his sleep too, long strings of “ _no, no, no, no, no_ ” and “ _please, please, don’t, please_ ”.  

Diego’s honestly a little impressed, that he can move around so much and remain asleep.  

He doesn’t really know what to do here. Ben’s only instruction was to wake Klaus up, so Diego shuts the door behind him, and walks closer to the bed. He pokes Klaus’ cheek once, twice and when he doesn’t wake up, Diego grabs one of his shoulders and shakes him. Klaus wakes up with a start, wildly, violently.

“What the-?” Klaus says, startled, sitting up, looking blindly around and reaching for a gun that isn’t there, before his eyes finally land on Diego’s face and he relaxes minutely. “Oh” Klaus is sweaty and he’s shaking, but he puts on his brave face, the one with the fake smile that almost hurts to look at. Diego doesn’t like that smile. “What brings you to my humble abode, dear brother?”  

“It’s _my_ humble abode,” Diego reminds him absentmindedly, then he turns to look at Ben because, what is he supposed to do now? Ben shrugs, the asshole. “Anyways,” Diego says tentatively, tuning back to Klaus. “I think you were, uh, you were having a nightmare?”  

Klaus squints. “Pray tell, how would you know that?”  

Ben gives him a panicked look that Diego decides to interpret as something along the lines of _“Please, Diego, don’t tell him I sent you or he’ll bring me back to life just to kill me again when he gets his powers back”_  

Diego’s brothers are a bunch of emotionally stunted assholes. He sighs. “I got up to piss and I could hear you screaming from the hallway”  

“Ha!” Klaus says, “And here I thought these rooms were soundproofed!”  

“They’re not” Diego says, but the truth is that he doesn’t really know. He wouldn’t put it past dad, to lock them to sleep where nobody could hear them scream.  

And Klaus is-  

Klaus is crying and Diego never knows what to do when someone’s crying. “Scoot,” he says, and he crawls into the covers to sit next to Klaus. “Tell me what you were dreaming about”  

Klaus shakes his head and puts his arms around his torso, and-  

Diego really doesn’t know what to do.  

“Hug him, maybe?” Ben offers, because yeah, Klaus’ always been insanely tactile. Diego braces himself because he’s way too manly for stupid things like hugging or _cuddling_.  

But, whatever.

He throws an arm around Klaus’ shoulders and Klaus ends up sobbing into his chest. Fun.  

“We never met, Diego” Klaus says, in between tears. “I never went back and we never met”  

Diego frowns and tries to figure out what the hell Klaus is talking about because that just makes no sense to him. He does remember, though, Klaus mentioning losing someone. Someone important. “Is this about the one you lost?”  

Klaus nods wildly, saying “ _Yes, yes, yes_ ” and Diego gets a weird sense of déjà vu, like he’s had this conversation before. He shrugs the feeling off.  

“What was her name?” Diego asks.  

Klaus gets a dreamy look on his eyes. “His name was Dave”  

 _His_ name.  

Oh.  

And, yeah, ok, the truth is. Growing up, Diego didn’t want to be that asshole who just straight up assumes people’s sexualities, especially not his brother’s. But he always thought there was no way that Klaus of all people was as straight as everyone in the family made him to be.  

Ben gives him a dirty look, daring him to voice an opinion. Diego glares back, because what kind of homophobic jerk does Ben think he is, anyways?

Klaus breaks their staring match with a loud sob and Ben gets a look of realization in his face. “Oh,” he says. “They never met. Five sent us back, which means _Klaus_ never went back. They never met”

Diego can’t even begin to understand how much that must hurt. Because if Ben’s right, then it isn’t just that Klaus’ boyfriend is dead-  

To this Dave person that Klaus is crying a river for, to him, Klaus never existed at all.  

“Tell me about him” Diego says, swallowing the lump in his throat, because it’s the only thing he can do for Klaus, really.  

So Klaus tells him.  

And by the end of it, Diego knows everything there is to know about the all american soldier who fell for his scrawny little brother in the middle of a battlefield. He knows about the hushed whispers and the stolen kisses, about their plans for a future together, about the dozen of cats and dogs they were gonna adopt.  

Diego learns that, for the first time in maybe ever, Klaus found love.  

And then he lost it.  


	7. I heard a rumor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a short one 💔💔 but there's more coming

“We need to do something about the commission” Five says, sipping into what looks like some insanely girly drink that Diego wouldn’t be caught dead drinking.  

“Isn’t a little early for that?” he asks, gesturing to the glass, because it’s like 9:00 am and he’s pretty sure that Five’s still pumped with a shit-ton of painkillers that he shouldn’t be mixing with alcohol.  

Five glares, clutching the glass closer to his body. “No”  

“Five-” Diego starts, but then he remembers Five drunk out of his mind and clutching a goddamned mannequin like his life depended on it on a public library. It’s probably for the best if he drinks in the house where they watch him. “Whatever, we’re all probably going to die young anyways”  

Five, the asshole, downs the entire thing while staring straight into Diego’s eyes. What the fuck.  

Luther clears his throat loudly, to get their attention. “So, the commission?” he prompts.  

“Yes, the commission.” Five says, nonchalantly, dropping the empty glass in the bar.  “I haven’t gotten around to tailor a plan just yet, so I'm not sure how, but I think it would be best to terminate them”

“The hell do you mean _terminate them_?” Diego asks, because he’s pretty sure the commission is meant to be this big timeless thing with thousands of creepy assassins and he definitely doesn’t a repetition of the whole Hazel and Cha-Cha thing.  

“I mean terminate them,” Five replies, in that patronizing tone of his. “They’ve decided the apocalypse needs to happen and they’re not going to stop until it does. Thus, we need to terminate them.”

“But that’s- ” Vanya starts, as she curls herself in one of the couches. “I mean, I didn’t mean to-” she takes a deep breath. “I didn’t mean to cause the apocalypse. I was scared and I wasn’t thinking, and if we get our right powers back, I’m not going to do it again”  

“ _When._ When we get our right powers back.” Five corrects, “And Vanya? I’m sorry but this isn’t just about you. I’m sure that if any of us, with any of our powers, got riled up enough we could cause the apocalypse.”

“But-” Vanya starts.  

Five interrupts her. “You were the bomb last time around, but the commission doesn’t care how it happens at all, just that it happens. We could keep delaying it for our entire lifetimes but eventually we’re going to die and they’ll be free to do as they please and destroy the world”  

And that’s-

That’s not good.  

Because, sure, what should they care whether or not the world’s still standing when they’re dead? But the thought of everything he’s ever known disappearing and dying with him is enough to make Diego feel sick.

“Wait hold on,” Klaus says, giggling like a maniac from somewhere in their backs. Diego doesn’t even bother to turn around to face him. “How would Luther cause the apocalypse, because now I’m just picturing big guy running around and walking up to personally murder all seven billion of us”

“Shut up, Klaus” Luther says, turning an embarrassing shade of pink.

“I don’t think that’s what Five meant” Ben says, and then, slower, “Not the point”

“Oh, c’mon Benny, I know that’s not the point” Klaus replies, and something in Diego’s brain short circuits.  

Because Klaus doesn’t have his power, and sure, Diego’s gotten used to Ben voicing his opinions even when people can’t hear him over the past couple of days, but-

 _What the actual hell?_  

He turns around, and sitting there on the floor, half hidden behind one of the living room’s couches, is Klaus. He’s crouching in front of something skinny and rectangular that he can’t quite make out from where he’s standing, with Ben’s sitting cross-legged in front of him. Diego gets closer to get a better look and-  

“Is that a ouija board?”

“Sure is” Klaus says, beaming proudly.  

And sure enough, it’s a goddamned ouija board. What really bothers Diego is that it doesn’t even look like a ouija board should look like, like the ones in movies with their terrifying drawings and ominous warnings written on the sides.  

The one that Klaus is playing with is a bright pink and purple abomination, with blue sparkles and little sloppy little drawings that are somehow simultaneously cute and annoying.  Annoyingly cute.

Diego hates it.  

Allison scoffs, and she goes to sit next to Klaus. “Does that actually work?”  

“Hell yeah, baby!” Klaus replies, as he puts a hand back on the planchette, and gestures Allison to do the same. “Show ‘em, Ben”  

Ben rolls his eyes, and Diego watches as he reaches and then, somehow ( _just- how?_ ) he puts his ghostly incorporeal fingers on top of the planchette and pushes it around to spell out exactly what he wants.  

‘ _IT WORKS’_  

Allison gasps loudly and turns to look at him. “Diego?” And she doesn’t say it, because she’s classy like that, but Diego hears the question anyways. Something like, _is that actually Ben moving the planchette or is Klaus just being an asshole?_

“It’s him” Diego says, feeling incredulous because, since when do ouija boards work? He always thought they were fake. Allison nods shakily, turning back to stare at the thing with an awed expression.

“Wait,” Vanya says, joining Allison and Klaus in their semi-circle on the floor. “You mean we could’ve done this this whole time? We could’ve been talking to Ben”  

Ben moves the planchette towards _‘YES’._

“Huh. Fascinating.” Five says, fixing himself another girly drink, while Luther gapes like a fish beside him.  

 

*

 

“It’s come to my attention that Ben and I are the only ones left without a power so,” Klaus says, after Ben got tired of everyone playing twenty questions with him and he fucked off to god knows where. “It’s finally time for some good old-fashioned trial and error”  

“Oh, this should be good” Five says, looking up from his mindless scribbling in the wall. Diego’s kind of glad he doesn’t actually live here, because now the living room’s ruined and the thought of painting that monster of a wall is giving him a headache.  

“Right?” Klaus says, jumping and twirling around like an overexcited puppy. He turns to look at Diego, and makes grabby hands at his knife holster. “Brother dear, could I pretty please borrow one of your lovely blades”

Diego sighs. “Please don’t call them lovely”  

But he reluctantly takes a knife and hands it to Klaus. It’s the smaller one he has, with the duller edge because Klaus seems like the type of person who’d trip, accidentally stab himself, and die. Diego doesn’t want that on his conscience.  

“Fine,” Klaus says, taking the knife. “Your macho and virile blades, tough guy”  

And before Diego can think of a smart comeback, Klaus throws the knife towards their family picture. It’s one of the old ones, a creepy oil painting from even before Five made his disappearing act.  

The knife goes flying until it impales itself in the picture. Right on Luther’s dick.  

“Dude!” Luther yells indignantly, and Diego can’t help but chuckle a little bit.  

Klaus pouts, like the child he is. “I was aiming for daddy”  

Luther gives him an incredulous look. “Is that supposed to be better? That’s like, our only picture from when we were that age”  

“I’m sure the picture’s fine,” Klaus says, waving his hands dismissively. Then he gets a sparkle in his eyes, that can only mean trouble. “Wait a hot minute!” he yells dramatically. “I heard a rumor that Luther made me some waffles”

And Diego watches as the sound-waves leave Klaus’ mouth and Luther gets that faraway look on his face. His eyes cloud over with the rumor’s tell-tale and he abruptly stands up. “I’m going to make waffles” he announces, and then he leaves towards the kitchen.  

“Shit,” Allison says, and yeah, the thought of Klaus walking around with the ability to literally bend people’s mind to his will is terrifying. “Don’t do anything stupid”

Klaus scoffs with mock offense. “When have I ever done something stupid?”

“Well,” Five says, returning to his mad scribbling. “As long as you don’t use the power to rumor people into being your personal slaves it should be fine”

Klaus gasps, and grins like a madman. “I heard a rumor-”

“ _No!_ ” Allison yells, and she tackles him to the ground.  

 

*

 

Later, when Diego finds him, he tells Ben about Klaus’ rumors.  

“Wait, you mean I got your power? That’s so useless”

“It’s not useless, you’re just dead”


	8. Are you lost?

This might have not been Diego’s brightest idea.  

It’s not that he didn’t realize that leaving the academy with no precautions when he’s wanted by the cops was a bad idea. He _knows_ , alright? He knows.  

The thing is.

The thing is that he wanted to see Eudora.  

He couldn’t stop thinking about last night, when he talked to Klaus. That conversation left him feeling a little shaken and more than a little wistful. And now, he’s angry at the universe on behalf of his brother, because why the hell can’t Klaus have a nice thing, for once? Out of all of his siblings, Diego thinks that Klaus is the one who deserves his shot at happiness the most.  

So he let Klaus more or less strangle him with his aggressive cuddling and when his brother finally fell asleep, Diego’s stupid brain made him think about Eudora. Because, what on earth would he do, anyways, if Eudora ended up dead for real this time? Or if she couldn't remember ever meeting Diego?

He didn’t want to think about that.  

Mostly because he’s mourned her once already, and the mere thought of a repetition is terrifying. And laying there, thinking about his brother’s boyfriend and his fate-  

He decided right there and then that he was going to see Eudora as soon as possible.  

And, well.  

Diego's not delusional, ok? He’s not.  

Eudora’s made it pretty clear again and again that they’re done for. Because sure, they spent some awesome months together, and in the privacy of his own mind, Diego’s big enough to admit to himself that those were probably the best months of his sorry life. The had fun, and they were happy and they were in love, but Diego knows he can be kind of a jerk sometimes and Eudora deserves better than that.

So when she asked Diego to back off, he did. Because he may be a lot of things, but he isn’t one of those assholes who can’t take no for an answer.  

That, of course, doesn’t mean that he can’t indulge himself a little bit.  

So instead of being the rational and mature adult he’s supposed to be, Diego raided all of his siblings’ closets until he found clothes that somewhat fit and then he walked up to the police station in hopes of running into Eudora.  

It wouldn’t even be that bad, Diego thinks as he settles on a bench across the street, if he had found better clothes. It’s not that they were too ill fitting or anything, it’s just that-  

Well.

None of them kept their clothes from when they were _this_ small. So everything Diego found looked either too loose or too baggy or just plain wrong on his body, and he wasn’t about to walk outside wearing an uniform again. He isn’t that stupid.  

Which means that he ended up wearing Klaus’ clothes.  

Not his first choice, really, but Klaus’ need to be as stupidly showy and flashy and flamboyant as he can means that all of his shirts are at least two sizes too small. His closet was full of see-through crop tops and tiny shorts and tiny skirts and Diego really, _really_ doesn’t get it.  

But hey! Who is he to judge if running around half-naked makes his brother happy?

So here’s Diego, staking out in front of the police station wearing what’s got to be the dumbest t-shirt that’s ever been made. It’s got a little drawing of an oddly phallic shaped cartoon ghost with its hands raised above its head yelling out _‘Boooooooooner!’_

It was the least vulgar thing in Klaus’ closet.  

He sighs and waits, and waits, and waits, and when, after what feels like an eternity later, a bunch of people start coming out of the station for lunch, Diego hurries to scan the little crowd until his eyes fall on Eudora.  

Eudora.

She’s beautiful.  

She the most beautiful thing that Diego’s ever seen, and he’s probably the biggest creep that ever existed, but he gets up and he follows her. He follows Eudora to a tiny hole-in-the-wall diner with cheap prices that they’d visit together sometimes, and he sits on a corner, hidden by some plants and watches her eat.  

She’s with Beaman, and she’s laughing and talking and _alive_. Diego wants to walk up to her and tell her he loves her and that he’s never letting anything happen to her ever again.

He doesn’t.  

Instead, Diego tells himself he isn’t a stalker and a creep as he follows her back to the station. He watches her go inside and he goes back to his sad little bench.  

He should probably go back to the academy.  

If anything, because sooner or later someone’s going to put two and two together and figure out that it was them who trashed the police station. Diego should be in the academy when that happens. Because he just knows that if his siblings are left alone when a cop shows up starts asking questions, the idiots are going to sputter out some random crap about the apocalypse or something and make things worse.  

So he goes to stand up, but then.

“Hey, kid!” someone says, grabbing his shoulder. “You alright?”

It’s Eudora.  

Of course, it’s Eudora.  

“Uh,” Diego says, smartly.  

Eudora frowns, and he pinpoints the exact moment when she notes Klaus’ stupid t-shirt. She scrunches up her nose. “Are you lost? You’ve been here a while”

Shit.  

Ok, maybe Diego’s isn’t as inconspicuous as he’d like to think.  

“Yeah, I’m lost”

 

*

 

“So what’s your name?” Eudora asks, once they’re inside the station, next to her desk.  

“I’m Di _-_ ” Diego starts, and then panics, because Eudora’s not an idiot and she might actually notice that the creepy kid who’s stalking her is him if he gives her his actual name. He scrambles his brain for a name starting with _‘Di’_ and the only thing he can think of is Dick. He’s not a Dick.

“Uh, it’s Dylan” he ends up saying, and his voice comes out a little wobbly and high pitched.  

Eudora raises an eyebrow. “Ok. Dylan,” she says, “Can you tell me your last name?”  

Diego stares at her.  

He really should’ve made a run for it when she approached him on the street.

“I just realized I’m not lost” Diego announces, but he’s always been a terrible actor. “I know where I am, so-”  

He tries to stand up from the little chair that Eudora gave him, but she blocks his path. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving a kid alone, it’s getting dark out” she says, and Diego would believe her, really, because she’s always been a saint who does things like hanging out with kids in crime scenes until someone comes to pick them up, but-

But Eudora’s eyes flicker minutely to the side, where a poster with this week’s wanted felons is. Diego’s face is plastered there, along with his siblings’.  

He tenses, looks at the exit, begins to wonder whether or not he could make it outside without being followed.  “Let me at least call someone for you” Eudora says, but she clearly noticed Diego’s minor freak out. She knows he knows.  

Fine.

Two can play this game. “I’ll give you the number” he says, with a sickly-sweet smile.  

So he sits by her while she dials the familiar number to the academy’s landline. She puts the phone on speaker, so that Diego can do the talking but she can still hear the conversation.

“ _Hallo_?” someone says through the phone, and Diego realizes with a grimace that it’s Klaus.  

“Hey, Klaus. It’s your favorite brother, Dylan” Diego says, and silently begs god or whoever’s listening for Klaus to not be a completely oblivious idiot.  

“Dylan?” Klaus answers, confusion clearly etched in his words. But then, after a moment, he gasps. “Oh, yes, yes, yes, Dylan, of course! How dare I forget about my favorite brother Dylan”

Diego groans. Beside him, Eudora gives him a funny look. It’s beyond his comprehension why Eudora hasn’t turned him in yet, even when she knows that he was with the bunch of misfits who trashed her work place. She’s always been nice like that, he supposes.  

“To what do I owe the honor of being graced with your beautiful voice, sweet brother Dylan?” Klaus asks, with a voice that suggests he might be enjoying Diego’s suffering a little too much.  

“I got- _lost_ ,” Diego explains. “In the police station, I need someone to pick me up”  

“ _Lost!_ ” Klaus echoes with a delighted tone. “Well, worry not! Your knight in shining armor is coming!” he says, and he promptly hangs up.  

Diego stares at the phone, and then at Eudora.  

“He sounds fun” she deadpans.  

Diego sighs. “He’s really not”

 

*

 

Klaus arrives a good twenty minutes later, that Diego spends very pointedly dancing around Eudora’s questions. She keeps asking about his life, and his last name, and _can you tell me about your family Dylan?  Who’s going to pick you up, Dylan? How did you get that bruise, Dylan? Where were you last night between 8:00 and 10:00 pm, Dylan?_

Diego’s almost happy to see Klaus strutting into the station. He is wearing a ridiculous imitation of his usual leather pants, and Diego takes a moment to wonder where the hell he got child sized leather pants. Who even sells child sized leather pants?  

“Hey, Diego!” Klaus yells out and Diego realizes, that yes, it’s just like he suspected all along. His siblings are dumb as fuck.  

Eudora narrows her eyes and Diego can practically hear the gears turning in her head. “I thought your name was-” she starts.  

But Klaus seems to notice his mistake and he cuts her off. “Diego’s worried sick about you!” he says, clutching Diego’s sleeve and making a show of checking him over.  

“Diego?” Eudora asks.

“Yes, yes, Diego” Klaus says absentmindedly, and Diego tries really hard not to punch him.  

Eudora puts on her business expression, and Diego knows she’s going into full interrogation mode. Because now she has _two_ of them in here. There’s no way she’s letting them go now, Diego wouldn’t.  

“Who’s this Diego?” she asks, crossing her arms in front of her chest.  

Klaus bites his bottom lip, looking around the room sheepishly. “Uh, Diego’s, y’know-” he throws Diego an apologetic look, and then faces Eudora with one of his brightest smiles. “Y’know, Diego’s Dylan’s daddy”

 _His-_  

“What” Diego takes a deep breath. “The fuck?”  

Eudora looks between the two of them slowly, “Ok,” she starts. “So, Dylan? This Diego is your-”

“His father” Klaus says, with a maniac glint in eyes. “His daddy, his papa, his procreator, the life-bringer, the sperm donor-”

“I think she gets it, Klaus” Diego says sharply, trying to shut him up.  

Klaus pouts, the asshole. “You’re not fun”

Eudora stares at them for a long time, looking more and more disturbed by the second. It kind of freaks Diego out, because the last thing he wanted was for her to become suspicious about their identities or whatever.  

“Are you-?” Eudora starts, and she looks insanely troubled. “Are you by any chance talking about Diego Hargreeves?”  

Diego freezes, because what the hell.  

(He wonders whether the giveaway was the tentacles from last night, or the tattoos on their arms, or the fact that Diego gave her the number to the academy. Maybe she just saw too many similarities between the Diego she knows and the kid she was trying to interrogate.  

Diego shouldn’t have come to see her.)

Klaus gives him a panicked look, silently asking him what to do. Diego sighs and then shrugs because he’s smart enough to recognize when a battle’s lost.  

Klaus nods his head, shooting Eudora a charming smile. “Sure am,” he says, and the he points at Diego with a dramatic hand gesture. “This is Diego Hargreeve’s offspring!”   

“Oh” Eudora says, blinking rapidly. “I didn’t know he had a-”

It takes Diego a stupidly long amount of time to realize what she means, and even a longer time to realize that he straight up gave Klaus the go ahead to tell Eudora _he has a kid_.

She thinks he has a kid.  

Eudora thinks Diego has a secret kid he never told her about before, not even when they were dating and living together and spending all of their time in each other’s pockets. And she thinks Diego’s the kind of shitty father who’d lose sight of his kid long enough for him to end up alone for hours in a police station!  

He’s going to murder Klaus.  

“ _No, no!_ ” Diego says, maybe a little too forcefully, turning to face her. “Eudora, let me make this clear. Diego Hargreeves is _not_ my father, ok? Diego Hargreeves doesn’t have any children”

_(“That he’s aware of!” Klaus supplies helpfully.)_

Eudora looks at him curiously. “I never told you my first name”

Oh.  

Fuck.  

 

*

 

Allison zaps in into the station in a swirl of blue and grabs them both.  

Diego shuts his eyes closed to avoid looking at Eudora’s confused (and hurt, why did she looked hurt when she thought he had a kid?) expression and when he opens them again, they’re at the academy’s foyer.  

 

*

 

“So you thought that prancing around the station where we are wanted was a good idea?” Five says, looking incredulous and maybe even a little surprised.  

Diego makes a low sound in his throat, mostly to acknowledge that he heard him. After that whole stunt in the station with Eudora he’s really not in the mood for more confrontations, so if Five wants to lecture him to death, then so be it.  

“You’re lucky Allison noticed you were missing” Five continues, pacing in front of the couch where Diego’s sitting. He looks like an angry parent. “You could’ve gotten us all recognized and arrested, and we really don’t have time to do unnecessarily things like breaking out jail”

Five thinks they weren’t recognized! Ha!

“I wouldn’t be so sure about the not being recognized thing” Diego says, glaring at Klaus from where he’s sitting with Ben, hunched over the ouija board again. Klaus, the jerk, shoots him a blinding smile that suggests he’s never done anything wrong in his life, ever.  

“So sure of-” Five repeats, looking between them. “You mean the cops know it’s us?”

Diego hums in agreement, wondering how the hell Five can even think to blame them, blame him specifically, when Diego wasn’t the only one who was stupid enough to go around picking fights and doing all sorts of illegal things while wearing the umbrella academy uniform.  

If anything, this is Luther’s fault, for letting the Horror free at the worst possible moment.  

Five gets a constipated look on his face. “You stupid, idiotic-” the house shakes, once, twice. Five takes a breath and it stops. “ _You morons._ Do you have any idea of how difficult it is to try and fix the timeline while keeping a low profile? Hazel agreed to help us, but if the commission notices that the entire police force is after a bunch of children that just _happen_ to have the same powers as us-”

“Uh, oh” Klaus sing-songs, giggling. “Sweet Five-y is in a mood!”

Five grits his teeth. “ _What?_ ” he says, and it’s almost funny, the exasperated look on his face.  

Diego would laugh, really, and he would team with Klaus to gang up on Five, because how dare him blame them and them alone for the fact that everyone at the police station knows where to find them? Because, sure, maybe Diego shouldn’t have gone to see Eudora, and sure, maybe Klaus shouldn’t have paraded around saying Diego had a secret child but, still.

It was everyone’s fault.

But he’s too tired to do anything but stare fondly at his brothers while they bicker like an old married couple. So he sits there quietly on the couch and listens and occasionally offers Klaus support while he goes on and on against Five’s very logical reasoning without any real arguments.  

It’s nice.

These sorts of peaceful moments are the one thing that he truly misses from being a kid. Whenever they had some free time on their hands (which was almost never, now that he thinks of it) they’d sit together, all of them, and they’d talk about everything and anything, and they’d be children together. It was the highlight of their weeks, to relax with one another, even if they’d never admit it to each other’s face. Of course, those nice little moments went to shit the second that Five disappeared, the second that Ben died.  

After that, they never really connected like that again.  

So maybe that’s what Diego’s enjoying right now. The fact that after years and years and years of yearning, he’s finally hearing Five’s know-it-all ramblings and hearing Ben’s quiet but amusing side remarks, knowing the rest of his siblings are somewhere in the house, safe.  

It’s like a dream come true, having his entire family together again. Complete.  

That’s why it absolutely makes sense when someone knocks loudly on the front door and interrupts Diego’s little bubble of happiness. He can’t have nice things.  

“Ugh” he says, and he means it.

Five narrows his eyes, “We’re not answering”  


	9. I can explain

They keep knocking and knocking on the door, and when Diego thinks that they’re finally,  _ finally _ getting tired enough to leave-  

“I’m coming!” mom says, cheerful as ever, her heels clicking rapidly and Diego isn’t fast enough to stop her.  

He’s halfway through the foyer, Five, Klaus and Ben at his heels. “Mom, no! Wait-”  

But she opens the door. 

And there’s Eudora.  

“Oh, dear! Diego hasn’t brought you over in a while!” mom says, pulling Eudora into a hug before she has any chance to react, and now Diego kind of regrets ever bringing Eudora over to meet mom because now he has to either lie to the both of them or fake his death. 

And it’s not that he’s a stranger to lying.  

He’s used to a white lie here, a fake identity there, the usual. But he’s always done a conscious effort not to lie to his family, to the people he cares about (except maybe Luther, or Klaus, if he’s being an asshole) and he had to lie to Eudora at the station. Which, fine, whatever-  

It’s not like she was ever going to find out, but  _ now _ .  

“Grace, hi” Eudora says, returning mom’s hug while giving Diego and his sibling an unreadable look. “I’m sorry for intruding, but I was wondering if you knew where’s Diego? I stopped by his place and the landlord said he hasn’t seen him in a couple days” 

Mom smiles that sweet smile of hers. “Oh, silly!” she says “Diego’s right here!”  

She grabs Diego’s shoulders, half shoving him in front of Eudora, like she’s presenting him as an offering and Eudora has the mind to just blink slowly at him instead of saying something wild and difficult to explain like  _ “No, Grace, that’s Diego’s secret son” _

Now, Diego loves his mom. That’s not a secret. In fact, he’s literally started fist fights because some people think that a grown man openly expressing affection for his mother is somehow embarrassing or a sign of weakness or something and Diego has no problem in kicking the stupid out of those people, because he _ loves _ his mom.  

However. 

However, that doesn’t mean that sometimes he doesn’t wish that mom was a little bit more intuitive, more understanding of social cues (more human, but Diego doesn’t think about that). Not that her bluntness and unreserved sureness are bad thing, because those things are basically her entire personality, but still. Maybe if mom payed closer attention to Diego’s wide eyes, or Five and Klaus’ (and Ben’s) horrified expressions she would’ve realized that this wasn’t a time for pleasantries. This was a time to shut the door on Eudora’s face and apologize later.  

“Uh,” Diego says, because he’s very eloquent. “I can explain” 

But he can’t explain.  

What would he even say, anyways?  

The silence stretches out for what have to be the worst ten seconds of Diego’s life, and then “Diego’s dead!” Klaus blurts out and Diego isn’t even surprised. 

“He’s-” Eudora starts, and she clearly doesn’t believe him. “He’s dead? Diego’s dead?”  

Klaus nods solemnly, his curls bouncing everywhere, “Yes, our dear Diego has unfortunately passed away” he fakes a sob and wipes invisible tears from his cheeks. “It was very tragic, we’re still mourning”  

Diego closes his eyes, and feels mom’s hands tightening on his shoulders. Why is Klaus like this? 

Eudora raises her eyebrows. “Ok, how did he die, then?” 

“He, uh, he fell,” Klaus says. “Yes, he fell. In the shower. Diego fell in the shower. We kept warning him about the dangers of showering barefoot but the poor bastard wouldn’t listen and now he’s dead! We’ll never see those gorgeous broad shoulders ever again. We’ve been robbed of those shoulders, lady cop, we’ve been robbed!” 

God, Diego doesn’t deserve this. 

And Eudora isn’t stupid, there’s no way she’s going to believe a single thing that comes out of Klaus’ mouth now, unless- 

Five huffs. “Can you rumor her already?”  

But no.  

That’s- 

Eudora deserves better than to be mind-controlled by Diego’s disaster of a family. 

“I heard a rumor that you-” 

She’s not getting rumored. “ _ No! _ ” Diego says, as he shoves a hand over of Klaus’ mouth to shut him up. And it works. Klaus stops mid-sentence and Eudora’s free will is left untouched and safe but- 

The asshole  _ licks _ his palm.  

“What the fuck, Klaus!” he yells out, while he tries to clean the spit off his hand by rubbing it all over Klaus’ clothes.  

Klaus giggles like a maniac and even Ben, the traitor, starts laughing, because apparently everyone at this house thinks that Diego’s suffering is the best thing that ever happened to them. “Not cool!”  

“Oh, children” mom says, hands at her hips. “Now stop it with the fighting, and please watch your language” 

Diego sighs, and stops trying to wipe the spit on Klaus’ shoulder. “Yes, mom” he says obediently, because it doesn’t matter if he’s thirteen or thirty or a hundred years old, if mom gives him an order, he’s following it.  

“Ok, that’s enough” Eudora says. “What the hell is going on?” 

Shit, Diego doesn’t want to tell her.  

 

*

 

He ends up telling her.

 

*

 

“So, you’re-” Eudora starts, for what’s probably the twentieth time. “You’re telling me you stopped the goddamned  _ apocalypse _ ?” 

Diego winces. “Uh, yeah- that's the gist of it” 

Eudora nods shakily and downs her third beer. 

Diego was under the impression that Eudora was trying to avoid drinking. Something about liver disease being a bitch and her not wanting to become an alcoholic because it runs in her family and nobody wants that. But, well.  

Diego understands. If the situation was reversed and she dumped all this crap on him he’d consider alcoholism too.  

“Ok, yeah, that’s-” Eudora says, and Diego gets up from the kitchen table and wordlessly hands her another beer. She takes it. “But it’s over for good now, right? No more apocalypse?” 

“Yeah, about that-” Diego starts, because he doesn’t want to lie to her anymore. Five keeps saying that the commission isn’t going to stop just because Vanya doesn’t feel all that murder-y anymore, that they’re going to find a way. “My brother says it could still happen” 

Eudora’s eyes widen comically and now Diego feels like an asshole. “No, don’t worry!” he tries to assure her, “We’re working on it, we won’t let it happen, I promise” 

But it’s a dumb promise because all they’ve been doing (all  _ he’s _ been doing, anyways) is running around with no direction and listening to Five’s bad advice and worse leadership. They’re the worst team ever.  

“Ok, I-” Eudora says, sighing after a moment. “I believe you, Diego” 

She reaches across the table and puts her hand on top of his and  _ oh _ .  

Oh.  

He misses her. He misses  _ this.  _

Because sure, if anyone asks, he’ll list off a bunch Eudora’s best qualities (like her ass, for example, Eudora has the  _ best _ ass). But the one thing that he truly misses about their relationship is moments this, moments where she reaches out to him and she holds his hand and they tell each other a bunch of sappy crap that they’ll both deny ever saying later. 

Fuck, he loves her.  

He’s head over heels for this girl, there’s no denying now.  

Diego turns his palm up and tentatively squeezes her hand. She smiles all sweetly and Diego smiles back, all sweetly too, because he loves her, alright? He’s in love with Eudora Patch and nothing else matters to him right now. Not the faint sound of Five and Luther’s voices arguing somewhere in the house, or the handful of creepy ghosts that lurk in the kitchen’s corners and yell at him every now and then, or the fact that he’s pretty sure that Klaus has been eavesdropping on them since they started talking.   

Nothing matters but Eudora.  

He leans in slowly, carefully, because it’s been  _ years _ since the last time that Diego kissed her and he knows he could be misreading this entire thing, but fuck, he doesn’t even care at all. He leans in and when Eudora’s lips are two inches from his face- 

“Oh my god, Diego, what the fuck!” Eudora gets up from the table inhumanly quickly, her chair falling back with a loud noise. “I thought we agreed that wasn’t happening anymore!” 

Ouch. 

“Didn’t think you find me  _ that _ gross” Diego says, huffing and crossing his arms against his chest. 

Eudora looks at him with an incredulous expression. “You’re like twelve right now. I’m not making out with a twelve-year-old, Diego. I have morals.” 

“I’m not- I’m an adult!” he says, but it probably makes him sound more like twelve-year-old. 

(Through his embarrassment, Diego’s pretty sure he hears Klaus running up the stairs and cackling like crazy in that moment.  

He was definitely eavesdropping.) 

Eudora takes a deep breath. “You’re literally a child, Diego, and I’m not even talking about-” she gestures to his body. “- _ this _ ” 

”What’s that supposed to-?” 

His words are cut off by the distinct sound of gunshots. 

Fuck. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know how this ended up becoming a diego x eudora fic


	10. Didn’t think that’d happen - Part I

By the time they make it upstairs and follow the noise to the foyer, there’s at least a dozen men holding giant firearms just fucking shooting their hearts out at everything that moves. Diego hates the fact he couldn’t name the type of guns that they have even if he tried. He just knows the guns are big and ugly and dangerous looking, and the men that hold them are  _ here _ , at the academy.  

Why on earth- 

“Diego, who the fuck are these people?” Eudora asks, already pulling out her own gun. 

Diego pulls on her arm until they’re hidden behind a wall, where none of the bullets can reach them. “I don’t know” he says, but he does know, doesn’t he? “They gotta be from the commission” 

Eudora gives him a blank stare.  

Fuck. 

Diego doesn’t have time for this. Last time they faced the commission’s pseudo-army they almost got fucking killed and Diego doesn’t ever want to have to even think about the words  _ Eudora _ and  _ dead _ in the same sentence.  

“Eudora, I need you to take cover downstairs” 

“Hell no,” she says, and yeah, ok, Diego was sort of expecting that. “I’m gonna call for backup, but until then, you’re not going out there alone”  

“Back up?” Diego parrots back. “You want to call the cops? Why would you-?” 

Eudora huffs, looking as exasperated as the first time she broke up with him. “Because _ I’m _ the cops, remember? I’m a cop!”  

Diego wants to keep arguing, but among the sound of gunfire, and the tell-tale of his siblings’ fighting, he clearly hears the sound of mom humming somewhere downstairs in the kitchen and he abruptly remembers that his asshole father turned off mom’s protocol to protect herself and others. She’s defenseless.  

“Eudora-” Diego starts, but she beats him to it with a resigned sigh.  

“Yeah, I’ll- I’ll keep an eye on her,” she says. “But I _ am _ calling for backup, ok? You can’t stop me”  

Diego doesn’t even care at this point. “Yeah, sure, you call” he says, because he kind of cares about mom’s safety more than keeping the academy free of the police’s scrutiny. “Please watch her, and I think Pogo’s somewhere downstairs too” 

Eudora nods shortly, and turns back on her heels towards the kitchen.  

Diego watches her leave and braces himself to fight for his life  _ again.  _ He’s starting to believe they’re never going to catch break with this whole apocalypse nonsense. He takes a deep breath, turns towards the foyer, but then-  

“ _ Shit- no, no, no, fuck, no- _ ” Klaus springs swiftly by him, desperately trying to get downstairs.  

Diego grabs the collar of his shirt and stops him. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” 

“Um, away from the psychos with guns?” Klaus says, peeking nervously over the wall they’re hiding behind. “There’s not much I can do to help you anyways, sweet-cheeks, so-” he shoves his left hand in Diego’s face while trying to squirm away. Diego pushes down the urge to remind him they’re children and his stupid  _ goodbye _ tattoo is not there.  

“Klaus, you can’t just-” Diego starts, griping Klaus’ arm so that he won’t leave. “You can’t just go and hide, we need your help” 

“You don’t need my help, I’m the lookout! And look-!” Klaus points towards the academy’s foyer, where most of the commotion seems to be happening. “Look out! Danger! That’s it! I’m done, bye!”  

Ok.  

Ok, so maybe dad only ever made Klaus into the lookout when they younger because the asshole thought that the fact that his number four was high out his mind could  _ compromise _ their missions, and it was better to have him benched. And maybe that was true for a while there, but Klaus wasn’t high  _ all _ the time and dad didn’t assign them roles for their missions  _ all _ the time, so maybe the real assholes were themselves all along.  

But Klaus looks sober enough to Diego right now, and besides. “Klaus, you idiot, you have Allison’s powers!” 

“Oh” Klaus breathes out, looking for all that it’s worth like he honest to god forgot he had the ability to bend people’s will to his liking. Diego wouldn’t forget something like that.  

As if on cue, a random goon with one of the giant machine guns pops up from out of nowhere and starts towards them. “Fuck, fuck-” Diego mutters, grabbing one his knives.  

But he doesn’t trust himself not to fuck up if he throws it and people with guns generally don’t get close enough to get stabbed, which only leaves Diego with one option.  

He lurches. 

He runs as fast as his stupid tiny teenage legs can carry him and slams into the man’s middle with enough force to make him stumble and shoot an alarming number of bullets that end up landing somewhere in the ceiling because Diego won’t let him lower his arms. The bullets come out in a wild burst that leave Diego worried Klaus is going to end up hurt, so he hurries to kick at the man’s groin, at the man’s shin bones, at the man’s knees, everywhere he can reach without getting shot, really.  

Diego manages to slice open the back of the guy’s hand, hoping it’ll make him drop the gun but it doesn’t and the only thing that changes is that the man kicks the knife right out Diego’s hands and starts throwing punches. Not fun.  

Suddenly, Klaus is right at his side, making some pretty intense eye contact with the man currently trying to give Diego another concussion. “I heard a rumor that, uh-” Klaus says, clearly unsure of which exact words to use. He could rumor the guy into doing the macarena for that Diego cares.  

“I heard a rumor that you died!” Klaus ends up saying. And just like that, the guy drops dead.  

Huh. 

Diego looks at the body.  

Then at Klaus.  

Then at the body again.  

“Who would’ve thought!” Klaus says, smiling brightly. “Murder was never so easy!”  

Diego sighs. “C’mon, let’s go help the others”  

So they go.  

In the foyer, there’s gotta be at least twenty different men and more coming with the same monstrosities they call guns and Diego easily spots the rest of his siblings, fighting tooth and nail for their lives. Save for Vanya, who’s gotta be hiding somewhere.  

Ben’s there, scowling. “Took you long enough” 

“I was busy,” Diego retorts, because, yeah, sure, he might’ve left Allison, Luther and Five to fight by themselves against a little army for way longer than he should’ve but. They all seem  _ fine _ . Ben doesn’t have to be a jerk about it.  

Diego realizes that Luther’s fighting at least three guys twice his size at the same time and decides that helping him is the best he can do at the moment. And now that he knows that Klaus has Allison’s rumors, he isn’t even worried about leaving him alone.  

He throws himself at one of men attacking Luther and  _ fights _ .  

Diego kicks and punches and stabs a few more people that he probably should, and the thing that strikes out the most to him is the fact that it’s been literal years since the last time he fought alongside Luther and not against him, but there’s just  _ something _ about getting hit at from every single angle that sort of makes them gravitate towards each other. Fight together. Like a team.  

Like when they were kids.  

For a second there, it’s just One and Two, the ones from before dad’s brainwashing ruined every single aspect of their relationship. Just punching and ducking at all the right times, without having to ask what the other’s going to do.  

It’s almost nice. Or it would be, if they weren’t being  _ attacked  _ at their own home. 

But that’s how Diego realizes that Luther’s holding back, clutching at his stomach in between pantings and groanings every time they get a second to breathe. It’s the Horror.  

Luther doesn’t want to release it. And, well. The Horror would be insanely useful right about now. Those slimy little tentacles could tear all the men to pieces without even so much as an effort and they all could get this over with so that Diego could go and check on mom, and Pogo, and Eudora.  

It would be stupidly easy, he knows.  

But he also knows that before, when they were kids, Ben never wanted to release the Horror. He always said it felt horrible, like being torn from the inside out and then being shoved through a metaphorical blender. And he never did have much control over it. So that’s what Luther must be feeling like while they fight.  

Out of control. 

That’s not something that Diego typically associates with his brother. But there’s nothing Diego can do for him, really, just like there was nothing he could do for Ben, even as the Horror grew more and more vicious.  

They take down an especially stubborn guy together, and while Luther’s still on floor, making sure the guy won’t get up, Diego places a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. He’s not going to say anything sappy and weird, not to  _ Luther _ of all people. But still, he worries.  

Luther nods shakily, clutching at his stomach again, and Diego can vaguely hear the Horror’s fucked up singing among the noise of their siblings fighting, begging to be let out. Luther ignores it. He gets up and keeps fighting, so Diego does the same.  

There’s less men now.  There’s a whole lot less men now.  

Diego takes a moment to quickly scan the room and check on the rest of their siblings.  

Allison’s popping from place to place, not nearly as fast and smoothly as Five usually does, but close enough. She’s got a splatter of blood on her eyebrow and Diego takes a moment to wonder whether it’s hers or someone else’s. But she looks like she’s doing ok.  

Klaus is-  

Klaus skipping along the room, dodging bullets and looking like he’d rather be literally anywhere else but here. But every time someone gets too close to him, he gets that hysterical look on his eyes, the one he puts on as a show, to scare people off and get away with what he wants. (The only thing that Diego can hear from his direction is a long string of:  

“I heard a rumor that you died!” 

“I heard a rumor that you died!” 

“I heard a rumor that  _ you _ died!” 

It can’t be the most practical way to use the rumors). 

Ben’s trailing behind Klaus, probably trying to make sure Klaus doesn’t get kidnapped again or something. Which, good. Someone should.  

Diego can’t see Five anywhere and he freaks out because,  _ where the hell is Five _ . He has a bullet wound on his shoulder and mom said he wouldn’t get full moment back on his arm until at least a couple weeks go by, and that’s definitely not the best way to fight. So Diego panics. He spins around on his heels, trying to spot him among the bodies lying on the floor as a last resource, but then-  

A guys stumbles past him, and Five’s perched at his shoulders like he’s a baby monkey holding for dear life to its mother and Diego isn’t even surprised to see Five repeatedly stabbing what looks like a letter opener into the back of the guy’s neck.  

His family’s weird.  

Diego turns on his heels, leaving Five to do his thing, because he’s not going anywhere near  _ that,  _ but then- 

_ “No, stop!”  _

It’s Vanya, and she’s yelling, and Diego doesn’t like that one bit.  

He hurries to follow the noise towards the living room, and when he pushes open the doors, he sees her. Vanya’s standing in the middle of the room. The furniture is all over the place, the couches flipped on their sides and the coffee table split cleanly in two pieces, and there’s three men lying deadly still on the floor (Diego takes a second to let an odd feeling of pride wash over him, because Vanya must have taken them down, and Luther’s super strength or not, it’s an accomplishment).  

There’s a fourth man, and he’s still standing. He’s got a gun trained right at Vanya’s forehead, and time seems to slow down. There’s no way either Diego or Vanya can reach him in time to take the gun away from him, any odd movement and the man fires and Diego’s sister is dead, and Diego would very much prefer it if his sister wasn’t dead.  

Suddenly, Five’s standing next to him and it’s a miracle the man hasn’t shot Vanya.  

Five growls, and it’s a wild and feral noise that makes Diego want to run and hide away forever. The next thing he knows, Five is raising his hand, and the all of the air in the living room seems to move at his will, twisting around him in unnaturally strong gusts.  

The man with the gun changes targets, now pointing at Five and he fires. He fires but Five does  _ something  _ with a flicker of his wrist and the bullet bounces off him, like he was swatting away a fly and not a goddamned bullet going at god knows how many feet per second. It freaks Diego out a little bit.  

Five pushes his hands forward, and the man (and Vanya, and the couches, and the remains of the coffee table, and the three dead bodies) goes flying until he crashes forcefully against the bar. Diego doesn’t even need to check, he just knows the guy is dead. And he worries about Vanya for two excruciatingly long seconds, until she abruptly stands up, shaking pieces of glass and broken wood off of her body. (Of course she would be ok, she has Luther’s thing, and Diego once accidentally threw Luther out of a three-story window while they were fighting and he was fine. Completely fine!  

Or mostly fine, anyways). 

“Five?” Vanya asks, looking at him with a funny expression and when Diego turns to look at him, he realizes why. Five’s-  

His eyes are white.  

That same empty white that Diego’s starting to believe will plague his nightmares forever. Five’s staring ahead, an overwhelmed but terrifyingly vacant expression on his face. “Five?” Diego tries.  

But Five doesn’t acknowledge neither of them and instead, he wordlessly turns around and heads back towards the foyer, where what’s left of the commission's army is. Diego runs ahead of him, ignoring the feeling of discomfort at the fact that Five doesn’t even turn to look at him.  

“Hey!” he yells as loud as he can, hoping that someone will hear him, because the last time he saw those creepy white eyes, Vanya killed  _ everyone _ . “Hey, you need to move! Move! Get out!”  

He starts fearing that no one’s going to listen, because Luther’s halfway through getting his ass kicked by some guy and Klaus is screaming his throat raw with the rumors with Ben standing anxiously next to him, but then- 

Diego locks his eyes with Allison’s across the gunfire, and she immediately understands what’s going on. She stops what she’s doing at once, and zaps herself into the living room after grabbing both Klaus and Luther. “What the fuck?” she says, staring at Five’s back as he goes to stand in the middle the foyer, directly under the chandelier.  

There’s still that weird wind current that’s making Diego’s blood run cold, making the hair at the back of his neck stand on end, because there shouldn't be so much as a breeze inside the house. The commission’s goons seem to realize that the wind is coming from Five, and they all level their guns and start shooting with all they’ve got at him.  

Not a single bullet hits him.  

The academy’s walls start shaking, caving in on themselves and making some truly terrifying noises that make Diego glad that mom and Eudora are downstairs in the kitchen, because they have better chances of making it out alive if the academy collapses.  

“ _ Shit _ ” Luther says, and it seems to shake everyone out of their useless staring.  

Allison gestures them to get closer. “Guys, c’mon, we need to get out” 

She wants to teleport them out, but she looks exhausted and scared out of her mind, and Diego just knows she’s not gonna be able to do it. He takes her outstretched hand, anyways. She tries, and she tries, and she tries, but it’s just too many people and the blue light flickers and dies on her hands every time until she’s whimpering with the exertion.  

Suddenly, the house shakes violently, too violently, and when Diego risks a glimpse, the foyer’s ceiling is collapsing. It just-  

It goes down stupidly quickly. And somehow, among the rubble and dead bodies, Five’s still standing, and he’s got the same disoriented look in his eyes. Diego expects the shaking and the wind to go down, but if anything, they seem to speed up and grow strength. Now there’s even pieces of wood and broken glass twisting in the air.  

“So this is how we die” he says, conversationally.  

No one answers. But then, “Oh, fuck it” Luther says.  

And he steps towards Five, climbing over the rubble. Diego’s wants to ask him what the fuck does he think he’s doing because whatever he’s planning can only piss Five off at this point.  

Luther unbuttons his shirt, and lets the Horror out.  

This entire situation is now officially on Diego’s mental list of the top ten most terrifying moments in his life, because he honest to god has no fucking clue which one of his brother’s has the upper hand here. And Diego doesn’t know exactly what he was expecting Luther to do, but a single tentacle latches itself into Five’s middle, lifts him off the floor about ten feet or so and starts shaking him like a maraca.  

Just. 

Fucking shaking him.  

Up, down, up, down, up down, and when the Horror drops Five face first on the ground and goes back into Luther’s body, the academy’s walls aren’t trembling anymore, and the air goes back to being perfectly still.  

Five sits back on his ass and opens his eyes. They’re  _ green _ , like they should be. 

“Five?” Vanya asks.  

Five groans, runs a hand over his hair. “Yeah, yeah, I’m ok” he looks around, and seems to take in the destruction around him. “Fuck, sorry, I hadn’t tried to use the powers on purpose before, I didn’t think that’d happen” 

“You didn’t  _ think _ that’d happen?” Klaus says, gasping dramatically. “You could’ve killed us, brother of mine! All that rage in such a tiny body- I should rumor you into going to an anger management support group”  

Five ignores him and lays back down on top of the rubble. 


	11. Didn't think that'd happen - Part II

They’re still helping Five get off the floor when she shows up. Diego doesn’t see her at first, and it’s not until Klaus mutters a nervous “Uh, guys?” that he turns to look at the remains of the stairwell, and there, standing gracefully on the very top step, is a woman.  

She’s holding a briefcase. 

Five immediately tenses on Diego’s arms. “ _ You _ ” he spits out, looking at the woman with pure hatred on his eyes and stumbling to his feet.  

The woman smirks. “Yes, me” 

Diego doesn’t like where this is heading.  

He sort of wants to ask who the fuck she’s supposed to be because she’s got a weird vibe that screams danger going on and her hair’s completely white even though she can’t be much older than them. Diego doesn’t like her one bit and Five doesn’t seem to like her either.  

“Last I heard of you, Hazel put a bullet to your head” Five says, then he chuckles softly to himself. “But I get to do it this time around and you’ve got no idea how happy that makes me”  

The woman blinks, clearly surprised. “You went back”  

“Yes, bitch” Five says, the sweetheart.  

And well, Diego’s mind finally puts two and two together. The briefcase, the air of superiority, Five’s wariness-  

This is the Handler.  

Diego doesn’t know a whole lot about her. He just knows she’s the one who pulled his brother of the apocalypse. And he’d be grateful about that, really, but she’s also the one who made him into a killer.  

The Handler starts stepping down the stairs slowly, skipping over pieces of rubble from the ceiling. “Very well, Five” she sighs. “I can’t say I’m surprised, you always were a little-  _ unpredictable _ . Thanks for the tip about Hazel, though, I always had my doubts about him”  

“What do you want?” Five asks.  

“You know what I want”  

Now, Diego doesn’t know what she wants but Five clenches his jaw stupidly tightly and the academy’s walls start shaking  _ again.  _ She probably wants the apocalypse to happen. What else would she even want?  

The Handler reaches the bottom step. “Today, though, I’m here hoping we can reach an agreement”  

Five smiles cockily. “You finally realized you can’t beat me?”  

“Don’t think so highly of yourself, I just rather not waste resources on someone as stubborn as you” she points a finger at Vanya. “Give me the girl and I’ll allow you and the rest of your little family to retire to whichever time you choose”  

No.  

_ No. _

Diego inches closer to Vanya, trying to shield her with his body or something but both Luther and Allison beat him to it. Vanya curls in on herself, making herself look small and non-threatening and Diego sort of wants to scream because she  _ is  _ small and non-threatening already, goddammit. The thought occurs to him, that the Handler has no idea they swapped powers. She still thinks Vanya can destroy the world, she still thinks Vanya’s the one she should keep in the present.   

Five lifts his arm and pushes it in the Handler’s direction. Diego feels the air gathering in front on him, throwing itself with an invisible weight at the Handler. She stumbles backwards, almost fucking falls down and then-  

Then she isn’t there.  

“What the fuck-” Diego starts, but then he hears her laughing somewhere behind his back and he turns around as quickly as he can.  

She lifts the briefcase up and gives it a little shake. “I’ve got time, remember?”  

“You stupid bitch-” Five does it again. The Handler blinks out of the way again. 

Diego’s brain can’t even process it properly. To him it just looks similar to Five’s space jumps but- he figures she must be, what? Stopping time long enough to calmly walk away from the line of fire?  

“Five!” the Handler says, with mock cheerfulness. “You didn’t tell me you had this ability!”  

“Fuck you” Five says. And yeah, yeah, fuck her.  

“And here I was, offering you deals” she trails off, smiling. “Change of plans. You’re the one who’s ending the world and I don’t care about your siblings’ fate”  

“What makes you think I’d end the world? I’ve spent my entire lifetime trying to stop the apocalypse! I’m not just going to-“  

“Ah!” the Handler interrupts him. “But this ability of yours is fueled by emotions, isn’t?”  

Her eyes roam over Diego, and Luther, and Allison, and Vanya, and Klaus, and Diego feels his blood run cold. The academy shakes dangerously, and Five lurches forwards towards the Handler. “I’ll never let you! I’ll kill you!”  

His voice wobbles.  

The Handler smirks, lifts her briefcase up again and shakes it. “You can’t” she says “I’ve got time”  

 

*

 

Diego wakes up. 

He’s lying on the ground, on some grass, staring ahead at a suspiciously grey sky and tall trees.  

He feels- 

He feels weird.  

He feels like something important just happened, but he’s lying on the ground and he doesn’t like one bit how all the colors seem muted and dull.  

He feels weird.   

He drags himself into a sitting position, takes a look around and- 

“Jesus, fuck!”  

There’s a little girl with long black hair and a flowy white dress standing a couple feet from him. She narrows her eyes. “What did you do?”  

“Excuse me?” Diego asks, because he’s so fucking confused right now.  

“What did you do?” the girl repeats. “You died all at once, and I didn’t make you so that you’d die all at once”  

Diego blinks. “Make us?”  

“Yes, make you” she says, very slowly, as if Diego’s a particularly stupid child. “And I don’t like whatever you did”  

Diego-  

Diego is-  

“You mean  _ make _ , as in-” he doesn’t even know what he’s trying to say. “Are you God?”  

She scrunches up her nose. “If that’s what you want to call me”  

Ok.  

Ok.  

Diego’s literally talking to God. Does that mean he’s dead?  

That probably means he’s dead. 

Ok. 

Cool, whatever, he can roll with this. No problem. He decides to focus on something easier to comprehend. “Wait, did you say we all died at once?”  

She nods. “Every single one of you. And don’t get me wrong, I made it so that you’d come here when you died,” she looks around the empty-  _ forest _ ? Heaven (or whatever) is a stupid forest, who would’ve thought? Diego doesn’t even like trees. “But it’s too crowded now, and I don’t like it”  

Diego realises two things.  

One. God is a teenage girl who doesn’t like crowds (who’s seeing a crowd that’s invisible to Diego), and judging by the looks she’s throwing at the empty space around them, she’s like two seconds away from sending the entire human race to hell.  That can’t be a good thing. 

Two. If  _ everyone’s  _ dead, that means- what does it mean? The Handler must have stopped time. And she must have killed them, before anyone had a chance to stop her. Diego and his siblings, and Five must have blinked for half second only to be greeted by the dead bodies of his family. Desperate and grief stricken, without anyone to talk him out of it-  

Five ended the world.  

Shit.  

“Take me back” he says, and he doesn’t even think about the implications of just straight up demanding something from someone like  _ God.  _ “Take me back, please, I can undo it”  

God looks at him. “No”  

She turns around, hops into a bike that  _ definitely _ wasn’t there before and starts paddling away.  

Diego runs after her. “Please, please, I know you can do it”  

He actually doesn’t know if she can do it. But she’s God, so-  

“I  _ can _ do it” she says, stopping dead in her tracks on the bike and glaring at Diego with all of her might. “Of course I can do it”  

Diego’s hit with the realisation that God’s meant to be omniscient and omnipresent and all that shit, and he truly,  _ truly _ , never paid much attention when Pogo and mom gave them the basics on religion.  

God rolls her eyes. “Why do you want to go back?”  

“I-” Diego starts. “My family” Because that’s it, isn’t it? If he had nothing to lose then he’d be bummed about being dead for a while and then he’d move on. But-  

His siblings.  

Mom. 

Eudora.  

“They’re aren’t your family, you know that, right? Hargreeves picked you all out from dumpsters, you’re not related. The one you call mother is machine that I’m still not sure where to put. And the girl-” she trails off, crosses her arms in front of her chest.  

It stings.  

But (and Diego only feels slightly afraid for his life for having this thought), God is wrong.  

He shakes his head. “No, no. Maybe you’re right about Eudora, and I- I know what mom is, but my siblings? They’re my family. I don’t give a shit which ditch my asshole father pulled us out from, they’re my brothers and my sisters and I love them more than anything”  

“But you resent them” God says, with a curious look on her face.  

Diego laughs.  

Of course he resents them. They’re idiots!  

Luther spent their entire childhood making Diego’s existence miserable, always trying to make him less in dad’s eyes.  

Allison went and made a life for herself without even so much as a goodbye. She didn’t tell anyone she was getting married or having a kid, and Diego broke his hand punching a wall when he found out because he wanted to meet his niece but Allison hung up the phone on him.  

Klaus went and wasted his life away, always drunk, always high, always giving Diego a heart attack one way or another.  

Five disappeared and came back seventeen years later expecting everything to be the same and demanded help without offering much of an explanation.  

Ben got himself  _ killed.  _ He got killed because he was careless and reckless and listened a little bit too closely to dad and Luther’s advice.  

Vanya wrote that book, that stupid, idiotic book that exposed all of their dirty little secrets and made everyone in Diego’s life look at him with pity and fear and disgust. And then Vanya went and ended the world.  

They’re idiots.  

“Maybe I resent them” Diego says. “But they’re my family, my siblings. I’d do anything for them”  

“I like you better than the other one” God announces, after a moment, and Diego has no clue who _ the other one _ is supposed to be, but he’s on the right track here.  

“Please send me back?”  

God sighs. “Fine”  

“ _ Thank you, thank you, thank you- _ ” 

God raises a hand up to rest on Diego’s shoulder and he shuts up. “You could do this yourself; you know?”  

No, Diego doesn’t know.  

But he doesn’t a get a chance to ask.  

 

*

 

Diego wakes up.  

“-didn’t think that’d happen” Five’s saying, and he’s still laying on top of the rubble.  

“You didn’t  _ think _ that’d happen?” Klaus says, and Diego realises he’s back. He’s back, he’s back, he’s back. “You could’ve killed us, brother-” 

Diego tunes him out.  

He doesn’t rush to pull Five to his feet this time, instead, he runs up the stairs, almost falling face first into the pieces of brick and wood and he stands on the very top step, more or less where he thinks the Handler showed up last time around.  

“Diego?” Allison asks.  

Diego shushes her and waves his hand in her direction. He needs to think. He can’t just stand there- she’s going to see him, she’s going to see him and she’s going to kill him, and Five’s going to make the world explode again.  

Diego steps back, grabs a knife- 

The Handler shows up.  

“ _ You _ ” Five spits out, looking at her with pure hatred on his eyes and stumbling to his feet.  

The Handler smirks. “Yes, me” 

Diego doesn’t waste a single second. He runs towards her and  _ stabs _ . He tries for her back, but she hears him coming and twists her body away. The knife ends up lodged in her upper arm, near her shoulder, and Diego doesn’t even think, he just slices down, down, down, until there’s an angry red gash on the Handlers arm.  

She cries out, but the sound is muffled by the shouting of Diego’s siblings. He pulls the knife out, prepares to strike again, preferably somewhere that’ll actually kill her- 

She grabs her briefcase.  

Fuck. 

Diego blinks and then, somehow, his own knife is sticking out of his stomach. He drops down to his knees, then to his back and it’s all he can do before his mind is clouded with  _ pain.  _

His stomach feels wet and warm and breathing hurts and swallowing hurts and Diego can’t even focus long enough to understand what the Handler and his siblings are talking about; he just has a wild sense of dread knowing that he failed and God won’t want to send him back a second time around.  

Suddenly, Ben’s face is front of him. “Shit, shit, Diego”  

Yes.  

Shit, indeed.  

Ben’s fingers hover over his wound and Diego pinpoints the exact second Ben tries to touch him and fails because his face falls, and he makes a choked and frustrated noise and it  _ hurts _ .  

It’s not fair, Diego thinks. It’s not fair that he gets a second chance, and that he still fucks up. It’s stupid and wrong and it’s  _ not _ fair.  

God, his stomach is killing him.  

He thinks, a little hysterically, that he should probably apply pressure or something because the knife only does so much to stop the blood flow and he’s going to bleed to death if he just lays there. But his fingers feel clumsy and stiff and he only manages to smear blood all over his hands.  

“Diego, Diego, c’mon, man, c’mon, you can do it” Ben’s saying, and it’s just nonsense because both of them know that if Diego isn’t strong enough to do something as simple as apply pressure to his wound, then the chances are Diego won’t make it out of this room alive. Not without help.  

The academy’s walls start shaking and Diego hears someone yelling, and he can’t do anything, anything at all but lay on his back and feel useless.  

“Five!” the Handler says, with mock cheerfulness. “You didn’t tell me you had this ability!”  

“Fuck you” Five says. And no, no, it’s happening  _ again _ .  

Diego tries to get up, he pushes himself on his side and tries, and tries, and tires, but he can’t. It hurts and the floor’s slippery with his own blood and- 

He feels Ben’s hands on his shoulders.  

Ben’s there, glowing an almost ethereal sort of blue, the same blue that engulfed him on the theater, when Klaus made him corporeal and Diego got to see his brother for the first time in over a decade. Diego’s hands are glowing too.  

He has no fucking clue how he’s doing it, or how long he can keep it up for, and his mind feels clouded, and fogged, and his stomach  _ hurts,  _ but he knows one thing.  

They have to stop the Handler.  

“ _ B- Ben _ -” he manages to sputter out, his voice comes out wobbly and broken and he’s reminded of his stupid stutter, but this isn’t stuttering, this is the fact that there’s blood pooling in Diego’s mouth as well. He’s going to die.  

“Ah! But this ability of yours is fueled by emotions, isn’t?” the Handler’s saying.  

Diego fumbles with his pants’ pocket, trying to pull out another knife, because Ben has his power, Ben has his power and Ben can kill the Handler and this whole thing won’t be a complete failure.  

Ben understands.  

And Diego watches, feeling like he’s underwater, as Ben nods shakily while grabbing one of his knifes, and then throws it. The knife flies across the room, making a completely impossible dive downwards that defies all laws of physics when it reaches the end of the stairwell, and impaling itself right on the back of the Handler’s neck.  

She drops dead.  

Good. 

Diego feels himself slipping away.  

 

*

 

Diego wakes up.  

He’s in the grey forest again, and the little girl is kneeling by some flowers. “You again? So soon?” she huffs, exasperated. “I don’t want you here, you need to leave” 

“I don’t know how” Diego says, because he  _ doesn’t _ .  

She reaches to touch him. “I thought you would’ve figured it out by now. You have the other one’s ability, after all”  

 

*

 

Diego wakes up.  

Klaus’ tear streaked face is two inches from his. “Diego!” Klaus screams, and he looks a little bit like a desperate widow from one of those soap operas that he secretly watches, with his eyeliner all smudged and smeared down his cheeks.  

“Klaus?” Diego asks.  

Klaus throws himself at him, hugging and squeezing and generally being a complete hazard for Diego’s air supply. “Diego, new rule, you’re not allowed to die” Klaus says, voice muffled by Diego’s shoulder.  

Shit.  

He died, didn’t he?  

Diego pushes Klaus away from him slowly and looks down at his stomach. His shirt is bloody and torn, but when Diego lifts it up to look underneath, his skin is completely smooth, like nothing even happened.  

He pushes himself into a sitting position and takes a look around the room. The Handler’s body is laying at the bottom of stairs, facedown and unmoving. Which, best news of Diego’s life since he heard dad kicked it.  

The rest of his siblings are there, and they’re staring at him like he’s a fucking ghost or something. “Take a picture, it lasts longer” Diego says.  

“You were dead” Five points out, ever the pragmatist.  

Diego nods. Vanya sits down next to him and pulls him into a hug, it’s a little too tight to be comfortable and he’s pretty sure she’s going to break his ribs if she squeezes any harder, but it’s his sister, so he hugs back. “How the hell-?” she asks.  

Yeah, they’re probably wondering how Diego randomly came back to life. But.  

Diego’s kind of wondering the exact same thing himself. Because, that was God, wasn’t it? And God kept spewing out some bullshit about- Klaus? Klaus’ ability?  

Diego thinks she might have implied that Klaus’ powers and connection to the dead go as far as to bring  _ him _ back to life (and Diego really doesn’t want to think about that, because he’s read Klaus police records and there’s a shit-ton of miraculously surviving overdoses that Klaus might have not actually survived after all). But God was speaking in such an insanely vague way about all that crap-  

His siblings are staring him, waiting expectantly.  

Diego surveys them. “I met God”  

And sure enough, they react the way Diego thought they would. Everyone gives him a wild look, raised eyebrows and wide eyes, and whatnot.  

_ (“What the fuck?”) _

_ (“Was it Jesus? Did you meet Jesus?”) _

_ (“I thought you were an atheist”) _

Klaus scoffs. “That little girl  _ hates _ me” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey people!!! sad news :( this story is almost over!!!! i haven't actually written the last few chapters yet but!!! i'm gonna start wrapping things up soon and i think it's gonna be like one or two more, maybe even three if i stretch it out but..... yeah 


	12. Et tu, Brute?

Five decides to take the briefcase and travel to wherever the fuck the commission’s headquarters are supposed to be to _ “tie loose ends” _ as he puts it. Diego’s kind of worried because sure, Five’s a violent menace that can and will gauge someone’s eyes out without hesitation and should be treated as such, but-  

Still.  

It’s an entire organization against his idiot brother who isn’t tall enough to ride a rollercoaster. Diego, and the rest of his siblings (or at least the ones with common sense), all tell him so.  

“I’m fucking tired of waiting around for them to show up” Five says, hissing under his breath like the weirdo he is. “I need to terminate them while they’re comprised, before someone assigns a new Handler”  

Diego wants to argue that it really doesn’t matter how fast or not he attacks, because the commission has time traveling machines and it’s not like the new Handler couldn’t just travel back to the current time. Or maybe even the Handler that Ben killed could travel from the past!  

God, Diego really hates time travel. “Five, that’s not-”  

Before anyone can stop him, Five opens the briefcase and disappears in a flash of blue light. Diego glares at the empty space where he used to be. 

“He’s going to get himself killed” Luther says.  

Vanya nods. “Yeah, probably”  

Diego groans and sits down on the stairwell. He should go and check on Mom, Pogo and Eudora, tell them the danger’s over and they can come out now.  

“Should we-” Allison starts. “Should we do, like, something? To help Five?”  

Diego hums. “Maybe”  

“You’re the worst” Ben says, walking over to sit next to him. “He could be dying as we speak”  

“Don’t be so dramatic, I’m sure he’s fine” Diego says, rolling his eyes.  

But, truth is, he doesn’t know. But Five took the briefcase, and he’s pretty sure the only way for them to reach the commission’s headquarters is through that briefcase. Or maybe the teleportation powers, but Diego doesn’t trust Allison enough to ask her to do it- plus, they don’t know  _ where  _ or  _ when  _ Five is, it’d be impossible for her to even try. 

“We can’t just leave him,” Vanya says, frowning at them. “He thinks he’s invincible but he isn’t”  

Yeah, that kid’s definitely going to get himself killed. But it’s not like-  

Klaus sighs dramatically from where he’s poking at the Handler’s body and not so subtly pocketing her jewellery. “Frères et soeurs, mes chers!” he says, walking towards them with outstretched arms like he’s Jesus or Beyoncé or someone important enough to give speeches like that. “I have a proposition!”  

“What are you thinking?” Luther asks.  

Klaus stops in front of them, and claps his hands together while shooting them a little grin. “I heard a rumor-” he says, stopping long enough to make sure he’s got everyone’s attention. Diego watches the sound waves leaving his mouth before dissipating.  

“I heard a rumor that the commission stopped existing”  

 

*

 

Five shows up, drenched in blood and giving them a death glare. “I was in the middle of gutting someone when everyone, and I mean  _ everyone _ , dropped dead. What the fuck did you do?”  

Klaus breaks laughing.  

“This isn’t funny, you know I don’t like being interrupted when I’m gutting people, Klaus”  

 

*

 

The cops show up.  

But Klaus hears some very interesting rumors.  

 

*

 

“Oh, c’mon Eudora, it’s not my fault those psychos decided to attack us!” Diego says, because it’s really not his fault, not this time, at least. She can get mad all she wants about his vigilantism and his running around in the dead of the night while punching all the wrong people, but this?  

Not his fault.  

Eudora turns to glare at him, and her right eye is twitching. The last time Diego saw that look, she was kicking him out of their apartment. “No, but it  _ is  _ your fault that you brainwashed all my coworkers”  

“I, uh,” Diego says, sheepish, and yeah, ok, she may have a point but. “It’s not like I could’ve stopped Klaus anyways, you know how he gets carried away”  

And Klaus really did get carried away this time. By the time Diego went to check on him, Klaus was in the middle of rumoring the cops into wiping his criminal record clean and getting himself some good diplomatic immunity in every single state. Diego let him get away with petty theft and vandalism, but he drew the line at public indecency.  

Eudora sighs. “That’s not the point and you know it. With the amount of illegal crap you keep doing, you all should be in for a couple lifetimes each”  

“Yeah, but-” Diego cuts himself off. He’s really being an asshole here, isn’t he? “Ok, you may be right” 

Eudora raises an eyebrow in and Diego takes it as his cue to do the grown up thing. But what’s the grown up thing, anyways? Taking accountability? Holding himself responsible for his actions? Fuck if Diego knows. “Yeah, you’re- you’re right. You’re absolutely right”  

“Thank you” Eudora says earnestly. “But my team’s still brainwashed and the paperwork is going to be bitch”  

Paperwork is the number one reason why Diego got kicked out of the police academy all those years ago. No one likes paperwork. Not even Eudora, with all that she insists on playing by the rules. “I could ask Klaus to rumor your superiors too, so you don’t have to deal with that”  

“Diego, why would I want him to rumor more people? That’s what I’m mad about”  

“Just thought you’d want a free pass” Diego says, because he knows her and he knows that if it weren’t for the questionable morality of the situation, she’d take the offer. “Just like old times” 

Diego never really got to go on any real cases as a cop before getting thrown out, but the academy did occasionally sent them and a bunch of other students to play dress up and follow actual cops around in crime scenes. The cops always tried to get  _ them _ to do the paperwork. Eudora and Diego must’ve thought of a thousand different excuses to not do it, and they had a fun little thing going on where they tried to get away with the most ridiculous excuse ever.  

(“No ma’am, sorry ma’am, I’d do it, but I really gotta go and pee real quick”) 

(“Sir, there’s a spider with the pens, I’m not going anywhere near that”)  

(“Ma’am, I can’t fill out the report because the case deals with clowns. I’m terrified of clowns”)  

(“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t know how to write”)  

“I still can’t understand how you got away with half the shit you did” Eudora says, smiling faintly. 

Diego hums. “Well, I did get thrown out of the academy, remember? No one can put up with my shit, no even the police department”  

_ Not even you _ , Diego thinks bitterly. But he keeps his mouth shut. Eudora’s got the patience of a saint, and Diego really, really misses her, but she made it stupidly clear she doesn’t want anything with him right before the commission showed up. He’s going back off, no matter how much it may hurt.  

Eudora stares at him with a soft glint in her eyes. “It’s not shit,” she says. “I mean, what you do- at night and stuff, I get it. I don’t like it one bit because there a rules people have to follow, Diego, but- I get it, I get that you want to help people, and that’s not shit. That’s good, you’re good”   

Oh.  

Diego suddenly feels all warm and fuzzy inside and he really doesn’t know to answer. He knows how to accept yelling and punching and insulting, how to reply when people call him hot-headed and immature and a goddamned child but-  

This? What is Diego supposed to say when Eudora’s looking at him like that? Saying the things she’s saying?  

Diego feels like he’s blushing. Is he blushing?  

Oh god, he’s blushing. Eudora reaches out to brush an annoying strand of hair out of Diego’s forehead, because Diego wore his hair longer when he was a kid just to piss dad and his dress codes off. “You know,” Eudora says, her fingers still tangled in Diego’s hair. “You were a pretty cute kid, you never told me you were this cute”  

Diego’s  _ not _ cute.  

 

*

 

Five said, that first night when they woke up with their powers all fucked up and in their thirteen-year-old bodies, that, theoretically, the universe or the space and time continuum or whatever, would try to fix them. It would try to fix them because the second Five brought them back in time, they became anomalies with the potential to mess up life and the universe and existence itself.  

Diego has no fucking clue what that means, except that Five seems to think they’re going to change back into their right bodies more or less at same time when Vanya was going fucking nuts with her powers and trying to murder them all. They’re going to change back at the same time when they jumped back in the original timeline. 

So Diego’s been counting down the days, because if April 1st comes and goes and he’s still thirteen, he’s going to kick somebody’s ass. Preferably Five’s ass.  

He wakes up that morning feeling giddy and maybe a little too excited, but he can’t help it, Diego’s getting tired of wearing the stupid umbrella academy uniforms and of not being able to throw a knife to save his life.  

He walks down to the kitchen, glaring at the remains of the foyer when he passes through, because that’s going to be a bitch to clean up. He hears Klaus’ voice carrying over when he gets closer. “Vanya, you know we love you but that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”  

“What’s the stupidest thing?” he asks, when he walks in. 

Klaus sighs. “Sweet little Van-Van wants to go back to daddy dearest’s cage”  

Diego blinks, and turns to look at her. She’s looking down at the table with a constipated expression and Diego can already see new dents forming in the table’s edge where she’s gripping it tightly. 

Why the fuck would she-?  

“She’s scared she’s going to lose control again” Ben says, and- 

Oh.  

That makes a whole lot of sense.  

Diego hadn’t really thought about what would happen with her when they got their powers back. Because Five has had her powers for the past week, and save for that little incident where he trashed the academy’s foyer, he’s doing an alright job at managing not to blow up the moon.  

But Vanya’s not Five.  

Vanya didn’t spend her entire childhood learning how to control herself, her ability, she didn’t spend every waking hour training and fighting to be the best. She just got these insanely scary and powerful abilities with the potential to end the actual, literal world they live in thrown in her face.  

Diego understands why she would want to go back in that cage. Hell, he’d want to go back to that cage, if he were in her shoes, and maybe the smart thing to do here would be to let Vanya do what she wants. But then he thinks about his sister, crying and screaming and begging, locked in there. “Hell no, you’re not going back in there, Vanya”  

“I have to,” Vanya says. “I-” 

“No,” Five says, interrupting. “You don’t  _ have _ to do anything. Dad built that cage because he was afraid of you, Vanya, but we’re not afraid of you, of you or your power. Do you understand? We’re not afraid of your power”  

Five sounds all earnest and honest and convinced, but Diego thinks the point would come across far better if Five wasn’t clenching his fists tightly and making the walls shake and groan angrily around them. It’s a fucking miracle the house hasn’t fallen to the ground with the amount of earthquakes Five’s been causing.  

Diego’s not gonna lie, Vanya’s powers, whoever might be using them, scare the shit out of him. The lightbulbs burst above their heads and Klaus steps forwards. “No-oh, we’re not being buried alive today” he singsongs, grabbing Five’s shoulder. “I heard a rumor that my dear brother Five chilled the fuck out”  

Five’s eyes cloud with the rumor’s influence for a whole two seconds and then he drops limply in one of the kitchen’s chairs. “Fuck you” he tells Klaus, but it lacks his usual bite.  

The walls stop shaking, though, which-  

Good. Diego’s kind of impressed with how in control Klaus is with the rumors. Because, he remembers once, forever ago-  

Allison rumored him to chill out and instead of the metaphorical chilling that she had in mind, Diego’s body temperature dropped dangerously low. He spent the whole next week bundled in a bunch of blankets until Allison stopped being mad at him and fixed him.   

(Although, come to think of it-  

Maybe Allison was just being a bitch and she knew exactly what she was doing).  

Vanya doesn’t even bat an eyelash. “I don’t think I could live with myself if I lose control again and you end up hurt, please let me do this”  

“Vanya, you won’t hurt us, I promise. We’ll help you stay calm” Allison says.  

“How?”  

Allison falters. “Uh- yoga?”  

“What?” Vanya blinks. “No! I’m not risking it, I’m going back in the cage and I’m- I’m going to start taking my medicine-” 

“No! No, you’re not going to-” Five says, then he turns to look at Klaus. “Make her understand, rumor her to understand, or to sleep through the change or something”  

“Uh, no?” Klaus says, going to hold Vanya’s hand and shooting her a concerned little glance.  

“Don’t act all self-righteous, you literally just rumored  _ me”  _ Five says. “We don’t have time for your morality dilemmas, just rumor her”  

Klaus glares at him. “I heard a rumor that you couldn’t speak for the next fifteen minutes”  

Five tries to speak and no sound comes out. It’d kind of hilarious, to see him all exasperated but impossibly quiet. Diego thinks he might be enjoying it a little too much, so he decides to take pity on his brother. “Klaus, don’t be an ass, give him his voice back” he says.  

“Et tu, Brute?” Klaus asks, gasping. 

“Klaus, c’mon-”  

Klaus pokes his tongue out at him, and then- “I heard a rumor you couldn’t speak for the next twenty minutes”  

Diego tries to speak and nothing comes out. Just- nothing at all, not even a fucking whimper. Fuck, Allison never did that.  _ “Fuck you, Klaus”  _ Diego enunciates as clearly as possible, and hopes that Klaus is smart enough to know what he means.  

And why did he get twenty minutes and not fifteen like Five did, anyways? 

Klaus blows him a kiss. 

Diego gives him the finger.  

Vanya takes a deep breath and clears her throat, calling the attention back to her. “Ok, guys, I know that you- that you worry about me, but it’s my decision. I’m going in the cage tonight”  

An uncomfortable silence settles over them. Diego feels like the worst human being alive for it, but he kind of agrees with her. They can’t risk it. 

“Hey, Vanya?” Luther says, after a beat. Diego had almost forgotten he was there, sandwiched between Allison and Ben. “You know you don’t have to, right? We’d help you, we- uh, I- I wouldn’t force you again. I shouldn't have, before”  

Is that a hint of emotional intelligence Diego detects in his brother’s words?  

“Thank you, Luther” Vanya says. “But I want to” 

(Diego wonders where Luther’s break through on not being a complete asshole comes from, but then, the Horror rumbles under his shirt and Diego understands.  

Luther gets it now, that they’re not always in control when it comes to their powers). 

 


	13. Never have I ever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's the last one!!!!!!!

Diego gets an idea.  

It’s a stupid and potentially dangerous idea, but-  

Fuck it, there’s no way they’re leaving Vanya alone to suffer and go crazy again.  

 

*

 

“You’re sure?” Vanya asks, still looking around them like they grew a second head or something. “I could hurt you, I don’t want to hurt you”

“Oh, but it’ll be super fun, sis” Klaus says, running around and shoving a shit-ton of pillows in both Luther and Diego’s arms. “We can paint each other's nails, braid our hairs- it’ll be our own cute little sleep-over!”

Allison nods, smiling softly. “Yeah, we haven’t done that in forever”  

Actually, Diego thinks they’ve never done that, like, at all. Not a proper sleep-over, anyways, like the ones in movies where everyone plays truth or dare and tells each other their wildest dreams and deepest secrets.  

Before, dad never let them be children. They did share beds every now and then, of course, but it was a thing they did behind dad’s back and thus, to avoid getting caught, never in big groups, never all of them together at the same time.  

That’s why Diego suggested it. Vanya won’t have to deal with her powers by herself, and they all get a little something they should’ve gotten in their childhood. It’s a win-win, honestly.  

“What if I go crazy and kill you all, huh?” Vanya says, ever the optimist. “What are you gonna do then?”

“If you start to lose control, I’ll just teleport everyone out” Five says.  

Klaus stops dead in his tracks and almost smacks Diego in the face with yet another pillow. “Oh! Or maybe Benny-boy can do like Luther did!” he says, resting his head on Luther’s shoulder in a dramatic motion. “A+ performance, brother dear. Ben would’ve _never_ thought to smack Five around like an empty ketchup bottle, he never uses his powers for anything fun”

“Klaus, you’d have to manifest him first, can you do that?” Diego asks, because he’s had Klaus’ powers for this past week and no matter how hard he tries he just can’t find the on and off switch.  

Manifesting ghosts isn’t as easy as one would think it’d be (or- coming back to life on command, apparently, but Diego isn’t going to dwell on that for his own sanity) and if Klaus has had a lifetime and still hasn’t figured how to be in complete control of his powers, then Diego sees no reason for him to be able to suddenly manifest Ben whenever he feels like it.  

Klaus shakes his hands dismissably at him, and stares wistfully off into the distance while pressed up against Luther. “I mean, if I had tentacles- _ah_ , picture the sex, it’d be mind-blowing”  

“Oh my god, Klaus, gross-” Ben says, shuddering. “What the fuck?”

Diego rolls his eyes. “Ben says you’re disgusting” Klaus blows a kiss in Ben’s direction with a surprisingly amount of accuracy considering he can’t see him.  

Weird.

“Guys, you’re missing the point here,” Vanya says, looking between them. “If you go into the cage with me, I could hurt you, and I-”

“Vanya,” Luther says, all earnest eyes and shit. “We want to”

That shuts her up.  

 

*

 

“Everyone’s ready?” Allison asks, then she looks pointedly at Klaus. “Nobody needs to use the bathroom?”  

“Sister, dear, you wound me, you know I can and I will pee in the bushes if have to”  

Five turns to look at Klaus, scandalized. “Don’t you dare to pee in here you-”

Diego ignores his idiot brothers and squeezes Vanya’s hand instead. “Yeah, Allison, we’re ready, close the door”  

Allison closes the door.  

It’s-  

The cage feels a lot more cage-y once the door’s locked. Everything’s dark and quiet and just the mere knowledge that he couldn’t get out even if he tried is enough to send Diego’s breathing spiraling out of control. He forces himself to take a couple deep breaths through his nose, holding the air for a couple seconds before letting it go again.  

Allison zaps herself into the cage, appearing in a flash of blue light on Vanya’s left.  

It’s all quiet after that.  

Nobody seems to know just quite what to say and Diego understands. He understands because he knows dad was a bastard and Vanya wasn’t the only one who got locked away by him at some point or another.  

Klaus got shoved in mausoleums and cemeteries for hours, for days at a time. Luther got sent to the fucking moon for years. Ben got locked in rooms until he could get the Horror to more or less obey him. Five got stranded in the apocalypse-  

Hell, even Diego got locked in water tanks every now and then, to test for just how long he could hold his breath for (the answer is a long fucking time, long enough for him to have developed an embarrassing aversion to water that he’ll deny until the day he dies).  

Maybe the only one who never got that particular type of torture is Allison, but Diego wouldn’t put it past dad to have locked her away just for fun.  

It’s not like they ever talk about this sort of shit. What Diego knows about his siblings’ training, he’s definitely not heard directly from them, just through accidental eavesdropping and Pogo and Mom being a little too talkative.  

It’s fucked up.  

Reginald Hargreeves was a fucked up man.  

“I vote we stop wallowing in self pity and play one of those dumb games you were telling me about” Diego says, when the silence stars to stretch into something uncomfortable.  

Klaus gasps. “Sober never have I ever!”  

So they play.  

It’s ridiculous, even more so because Klaus insists they still have to drink something even if it isn’t alcohol, and the only remotely liquid thing they brought with them is a jumbo bottle of maple syrup.  

It’s gross, it’s ridiculous, Ben makes him drink his shots of maple syrup for him, and Diego ends up learning a little more than he would’ve liked about his siblings but it’s good.  

It’s fun.  

(“Never have I ever been kicked out a public space” Klaus, Ben, Five, Allison and him, too. He’s isn’t surprised.  

“Never have I ever recorded a sex tape” Klaus and Allison. He is surprised.  

“Never have I ever doubted my heterosexuality” Vanya drinks, and Diego reluctantly takes a shot too while everyone stares at them with wide eyes and Klaus cackles like a maniac.

“Never have I ever waxed my ass” Klaus and- “Gross, Luther, what the fuck-?”)  

It’s all fun and games until Five announces it should be happening soon.  

Vanya tenses immediately and Diego feels the lighthearted mood shift until everyone’s staring at each other anxiously and shooting Vanya concerned looks. But it’s not like they can do anything for her, really.  

So they wait.  

They wait, and after a couple minutes, the air around them shifts and moves and groans and suddenly everything is filled with that blinding blue light that brought them into this mess in the first place.

Just like the first time, Diego blinks and suddenly everyone looks like they’re thirty.  

 _Finally_.  

“Ben!” Klaus screams and throws himself into the empty space at Diego’s right, surely trying and failing to hug their brother.  

Oh.  

Ben’s gone, again.  

Diego pushes the fresh wave of grief aside because he’s still there, Ben’s still there, even if he can’t see him, and focuses on the rest of his siblings instead.  

They’re in various stages of poking their own faces and testing their powers, making sure everything’s how it should be. Five still in a  kid’s body, because he explained he’d have to live through the moment when he first traveled to them and that moment wasn’t anywhere in the future. And Vanya-  

Vanya’s hugging her middle, with her eyes tightly shut.  

“Vanya?” Diego tries.  

Vanya opens her eyes, they’re tinted white around the edges. “Please get out, please”  

As if in cue, their pile of pillows and blankets and junk food lift to the air, hovering a couple inches above their heads and spinning in soft circles. Nowhere near as violent as it was when she went crazy before, or when Five went crazy, but still.  

Not good.  

“Hey, Vanya-” Luther says, and Diego fears for a second there that he’s going to do something stupid like threaten her or something but no- “Vanya, c’mon, we’re here, you’re not alone, just breath” Unsurprisingly, Vanya doesn’t calm down one bit, but still, Diego’s kind of impressed that Luther used his words and not his fists for a change.  

Diego leans closer to her. “Van, we’re here, we’re not leaving you”  

She’s gulping big breaths, gasping, very clearly nearing a panic attack or something and Diego doesn’t know what to do.  

Allison chokes out a noise, and when he turns to look, he realizes her throat is sliced, just like before. Her neck is covered with white bandages and she can’t speak a single word.  

Fuck.  

Diego’s forever going to be haunted by the image of finding his sister in a pool of her blood, looking like that. He’d thought she was dead.

Vanya seems to notice Allison’s wound as well, and it all spirals from there. She yells out an unintelligible word and their flying crap picks up speed, the cage’s dingy light bulbs burst and the pieces of glass fly around too, and Diego starts to fear they’re going to get killed again.  

God, he needs a break.  

“ _Shit, shit, shit-_ c’mon, I’ll take you outside, she isn’t going to stop” Five says, stretching a hand in their direction. Diego hesitates, but he takes it, he grabs Five’s hand with one of his own and pushes Luther around with the other one to get him to do the same. He grabs Allison, he tries to grab Klaus-  

“Hell no,” Klaus says, somehow managing to look calm and only slightly annoyed at them in the midst of Vanya’s breakdown. “We’re not leaving her”  

“Klaus, for god’s sake-”  

Klaus stands up, fishes the stupid maple syrup bottle from the air and sits down cross-legged in front of Vanya. “Never have I ever tried to murder the entire world” he says, in a stupidly high voice, while shaking the bottle in front of her face.  

Almost immediately after he says it, Klaus turns to his side and hisses a low noise on his throat. Diego imagines Ben saying something along the lines of, “Klaus, you idiot, how is reminding her she’s got the power to kill us all going to help?”

At least that’s what Diego would say, anyways.  

“C’mon, knuddelbär, sweetheart, Vanya dear,” Klaus says. “You have to drink the syrup, sis, I don’t make the rules. I know you and I know you’ve tried to murder us all with your freaky power thing”  

“Klaus, I’m begging you to shut the fuck up” Five says.  

Klaus ignores him. “Here, I’ll drink too” he says, taking swing out of the bottle. “I’ve tried to kill everyone too because people are annoying, but my powers are lame as fuck, I mean- I'd have to manifest a shit-ton of ghosts if I wanted to explode the moon, and then it'd still be kind of difficult, sister dear”  

Diego wants to ask if he’s going somewhere with his rambling, but Vanya’s been staring straight ahead for a while now, and while none of their things have stopped swiveling in the air, they haven’t picked up any more speed either, the walls aren’t shaking, Vanya’s eyes aren’t white all the way. Diego doesn’t dare to open his mouth and disturb whatever the hell Klaus is trying to do.  

Vanya at least is starting to blink every now and then, sluggishly focusing on Klaus’ words.  

It’s almost like-

Like Klaus trying to talk her ear off until she’s so exasperated, she can’t focus on bringing on the apocalypse. It’s seems like it’s working.

“And the way you did your thing in the theater!” Klaus gasps and pretends to swoon, fanning himself with his hands. “Excellent! Magnificent! Just glorious, Vanya, glorious, perfect! I personally loved the impromptu outfit change, like- _damn_ , not everyone can rock the all-white look, y’know? Although maybe your orchestra won’t dig the whole white violin aesthetic thing, it makes you look too good! You’re gonna overshadow the poor people with the- uh, the big violins”  

Klaus grins conspiratorially. “Maybe we should form our own orchestra! You can be the white violin, and we’ll be on your back, playing those giant fat violins and-”

Suddenly, all of their blankets and pillows and the pieces of glass fall to the ground with dull thuds. Vanya’s eyes flash a terrifying shade of white and Diego hears all of his siblings collectively holding their breaths. But then-

“Did you just call cellos giant fat violins?”  

 

*

 

They still spend the night at the cage, because Vanya doesn’t feel like she’s in control, but they convince her not to take her medication, to leave the cage with them in the morning, and Diego counts that as a win.  

It’s a long night.

Vanya cries every time she sees Allison struggling to communicate, then Allison cries every time Vanya cries, then Klaus just cries because he seems to enjoy crying-  

It’s a long night.  

 

*

 

The next morning, Diego gets a call, at the academy. It’s Eudora, and she tells him, in that same tone she reserves for when she’s trying not to sound too giddy, that she’s thought it over and reached the conclusion that while Diego is, in fact, a bit of an asshole that she never wants to date again, she kind of misses him.  

She says she wants to meet him for dinner or something, because she misses her best friend, and she threatens to arrest him if he ever tries something funny but she wants to meet him.  

Good, Diego thinks, he misses his best friend too, and he’ll take her anyway she lets him have her. It’s probably for the best, anyways, Diego’s knows he’s a shitty boyfriend.  

 

*

 

Later, after the novelty of being in the right bodies wears off and everyone slowly drifts apart after breakfast to do whatever it is his siblings do when they’re not together, Diego finds Klaus curled up in his bed.  

His bed, Diego’s, because apparently Klaus doesn’t care that they were only swapping rooms because Diego was freaked out by the ghost in the corner of his room. “Klaus?” he asks, sitting next to him.  

He wonders how Klaus can stand just existing next to the gross ghost with the fucked-up neck. Diego feels a little uncomfortable, knowing she’s there, even if can’t see her anymore.  

“Go away, sweet-cheeks, I'm busy” Klaus says, not bothering to look up.  

Klaus doodling in the cover of a random book that Diego sort of hopes isn’t his, and when he cranes his neck to look, he sees it’s a little drawing, a bad drawing, really, Klaus is no artist, but it’s a drawing. A man wearing a military vest and a kind smile, a necklace with a star of David hanging from his neck.  

Dave, then.  

Klaus looks so sad. Diego can’t stand the sight of his brother looking like that.  

 

*

 

Diego can’t stand the sight of his brother looking like that.

He stumbles down the stairs as fast as he can, dragging Klaus along with him, and yells at the top of his lungs. _“Five!”_  

 

*

 

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” Five says.  

Diego nods. “Yeah, it’s pretty dumb, but it’s Klaus’ boyfriend”

Five stares at them for a long time, long enough that Diego starts feeling bad for getting Klaus’ hopes up for nothing, but then-

“Yeah, sure, why the hell not? We already fucked up the timeline, anyways”

 

*

 

“You sure?” Five asks for the millionth time, but he finally places Hazel’s briefcase in Klaus’ awaiting arms. “It isn’t like you can just swoop in and kidnap your boy-toy"

“Why, Five-y, if that was my plan all along” Klaus says, eyeing the briefcase like he simultaneously wants to worship it and set it on fire. “Pop up in the middle of the night and steal sweet, handsome Dave from his bed”

Five rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean, Klaus. We went back in time, he doesn’t know you at all, you’d have to- you’d have to stay for a while, fight the war again, get him to like you again-”

Yeah, Diego didn’t really think it through when he proposed that Klaus could travel back to the sixties, get his groove on with Dave and then bring him back to them, to the academy. He never considered the fact that Klaus would be serving another tour on _Vietnam_ just to talk to his boyfriend.  

It’s a little too late to try and convince Klaus not to go, but still. Everything could go wrong, and Diego’s brain is going a mile a minute with the possibilities. Klaus could end up in the wrong war or something, Klaus could lose the briefcase, Klaus could get fucking killed for being- _himself_ , Klaus could get killed, period.  

Fuck.

“Hey, what if Dave doesn’t want to travel to the future?” Diego asks. He honest to god doesn’t know what he’d do if Eudora walked up to him one day and asked him to leave everything he knows behind and follow her fifty years into the future. The thought is a little maddening.  

Klaus sighs dreamily. “He’ll want to. It was just Dave and I, y’know?”

Ok, then.  

 

*

 

Diego doesn’t know what to with himself after Klaus leaves.  

He paces around the academy for a while, helps mom clean up some of the debris from the foyer, makes a sad attempt at cooking dinner, bothers Luther until he agrees to help him set up a room for Vanya to practice her powers in-

But he can’t stop thinking about the fact that he willing left Klaus, of all people, go into a war zone alone. He should’ve at least volunteered to go with him, but the thought didn’t occur to him before and now it’s too late to do anything but sit down and worry.  

So does exactly that, he hollers himself up in his room, sits down, and worries.  

It’s not very fun.  

Diego finds Klaus’ ouija board, the one that’s pink and bright and horrifying, and decides to give it a go, because he’s the worst brother alive and he didn’t even ask whether Ben would be travelling to the past, too, or not.  

He takes it to the living room and sits down crossed legged.  

“Hey, Ben, you here?” he says, his fingers pressed to the planchette. Nothing happens for couple seconds, and Diego starts feeling like an idiot for the mere fact that he’s playing with the world’s most ridiculous ouija board that ever existed. Seriously, he’s going to buy one of those vintage ones, the ones with ominous warnings and dark colors.

The planchette moves towards _‘YES_ ’.

“Is it really you, though? Because if I find out I’m talking to a dead nanny, I'm gonna be pissed”

_‘YOU’RE A DICK’_

Yeah, ok, that checks.  

“Awesome,” Diego says. “Now, tell me-”

There’s a loud sound somewhere in his back, the sort of noise a cat would make when dipped in cold water, only worse. Louder, messier, deeper, and it’s accompanied by a flash of blue light. Diego turns to look, and there, laying on the floor, in the middle of the living room, is Klaus. There’s a guy with him.  

Tall, blond, and clutching Klaus’ hand on his own like his life depended on it.  

They’re both laughing a little hysterically, poking at each other and taking in their surroundings. They look happy, Diego realizes, so fucking happy. He’s never seen Klaus look that happy.  

“Look what the cat dragged in” Diego says, grinning slowly and edging closer to them.

Klaus immediately shots up to his feet, Dave following behind. “Diego! Brother dear, I’ve missed you!” he yells out, and rushes to aggressively hug him.  

“Yeah, yeah,” Diego says, awkwardly patting Klaus’ back. “Missed you, too, buddy”

Klaus shoves him away, and turns to Diego’s left. “Ben!”  

His hands glow blue, and there, standing next to Diego, is Ben.  

All blue and ghostly. “Hey, Klaus” he says. “You’re gonna introduce us, or-?”  

Klaus suddenly seems to remember that yes, he did bring his very much alive boyfriend through time, and no, maybe he shouldn’t just ignore him while he says his hellos. “Dave, sweetheart” he says, grabbing Dave’s hand and pulling him closer. “These are my favorite siblings! You can meet the rest later, but they’re boring”

“Oh, ok.” Dave says. “Hello, I’m Klaus’, uh- I'm his-”  

Klaus lifts his left hand up and shoves in both Ben and Diego’s face. “He’s my fiancé, bitches!”

There, on his finger, is a ring. It’s small, and cheap, and a dull color, and Diego’s pretty sure that any other day, Klaus wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something as ugly as that thing. But Diego sees it and he understands.  

It’s his.  

It’s Dave’s.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaahhhh!! it's done!!! again, thank you all so much for your kudos and lovely comments, they give me life!!! 
> 
> also, stay tuned because i'm still obsessed with this show i have a lot of free time!!! tell me what you want me to write next!!! 
> 
> love y'all <3 <3

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr @myeyesarenotblue


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